Mass Effect: Interregnum
by The Naked Pen
Summary: The Battle of the Citadel has been won. Saren Arterius is dead. Commander Shepard is dead. Garrus Vakarian isn't. Alone on Omega among slavers, murderers, mercenaries, insane warlords and the worst of the galaxy's criminals, he does the only thing he can: declares war. The Archangel legend is born, but angels can fall. Nothing's ever easy...
1. Alpha And Omega: The Room

_Why is nothing ever easy?_

_Sometimes, I catch myself wondering. Wondering if what I'm doing is right, if it's worth it._

_Define 'right'. Define 'worth it'._

_Everything hinges on that. Is the law right? If not, why not? What is right? Is it right to go after the scum of the galaxy and put them out of our misery? Is it right to act outside the law? Can there be justice outside the law? One given is one returned, that's what I was always taught. Kill, get killed. Only those willing to be shot should shoot. But am I? Is punishment of crime a crime in itself?  
_

_Questions, questions. Listen to me. Always moralising. Should probably try to stop that. Gets in the way. But if I don't think about what I do, how can I call it right? If I can't call it right, how can I justify it?__ If I kill a killer, am I righting a wrong, or doubling it? A lot of people would say the former. The law says the latter. But the law can be wrong._

_I've spent all my life in service to one law or another. Academy law. Hierarchy law. Citadel law. And I always thought it held me back. But when you're out here in the wilds, when you don't have a law to turn to, what makes you better than them when you put them down? _

_I don't know. _

_Great. _

_Not really the most encouraging of conclusions, but I can work on it. At least it's a start.  
_

_It's a start._

* * *

**MASS EFFECT: INTERREGNUM**

**ALPHA AND OMEGA  
**

**ONE: THE ROOM  
**

* * *

Garrus Vakarian sat in a room that stank of old blood and stared down the barrel of a pistol. The grey metal glinted in the dim light from the solitary working fixture overhead, the little suns of the reflection flickering with every tiny movement of the batarian holding it. The blood was worked into the floor, as much a part of the metal as years of dirt and abuse. When they'd dragged him in, he'd seen an ominous dark stain beneath the chair. Blood didn't stain metal unless you had a lot of it. _That's it, Garrus. Think encouraging thoughts._

"You should really clean that more often," he said. "You're building up all sorts of dirt around the barrel. Leave that for long enough and one day it'll misfire, blow up in your hands. Happened to a friend of mine once. He wasn't exactly pretty beforehand, but now... well, let's just say he doesn't get many dates these days."

"Shut the hell up," the batarian standing above him said, voice slightly tinny behind his helmet, "and tell me where the _fuck_ the codes are."

_If there's one thing I love about the Blood Pack, it's their politeness._

"So, your plan to get the codes that you have no other way of acquiring without me... is to threaten to kill me? Genius," Garrus said. "Your boss'll be happy with that one."

"Tulk," the merc said, stepping back a couple of paces and nodding to the krogan over his left shoulder. Tulk ambled up and slammed the butt of his shotgun across Garrus's face, sending him sprawling from his chair in the middle of the bare side-room. He crashed onto the floor, the metallic taste of blood filling his mouth. His arms were chained together behind him, so his head cracked painfully against the iron-grey metal. His vision faded for a second, and purple sparks flashed in front of his eyes like little agonising fireflies. The coppery smell of fresh blood began to overpower the stale as little pieces of glass tumbled down his face; his visor had smashed into innumerable tiny shards, leaving nothing but the frame hanging on the side of his head.

"You know, this room is soundproof," the batarian said, squatting down beside him. "Even if it weren't, we have an... arrangement with the bartender."

Garrus spat a mouthful of blue blood onto the metal floor. His head pulsed with a driving, hot pain, like someone had overcharged a pistol directly into his brain. "A dramatic pause arrangement, huh?" he said. "I knew there was something untrustworthy about that bartender. Probably the fact that he was a bartender."

"My point is, you could scream for hours and nobody would know a thing."

"I'm not a great screamer."

"You think you can come here and steal from the Blood Pack and get away with it?" the batarian snarled, and slammed a durasteel boot into Garrus's stomach. It hurt far more than seemed reasonable.

He grimaced. "Is it really stealing if you stole it first?"

"Take it all and keep it if you can, I always say," the krogan rumbled.

"Interesting," Garrus said thoughtfully. "I assume the ship's legal owner couldn't keep them?"

"He tried," the batarian said, with more than a hint of smugness.

"Well, it's taking part that counts," Garrus said, and tried to push himself up into a sitting position with his legs. One of his boots slipped on his own blood and sent him slumping back to the floor.

"Seems unusual to see a batarian in the Blood Pack," he continued. "I thought your lot mostly went in for the Blue Suns."

"We're an equal opportunity employer," the krogan said, and the batarian kicked him again, this time under the chin. There was a sharp crack as metal met metal. His head snapped back, smashing into the wall behind him, and a million white-hot, unbearably bright stars erupted behind his eyes. Venomous, icy pain rippled through his skull like an earthquake and he passed out for few seconds.

When he came to, his vision swam sickeningly for a couple of seconds, the single light suddenly horribly bright. It left a thick purple stain in his retina. One of them had shoved him up against the wall so that his back leant on it, leaving him slumped on his ass. _Ah, dignity, my old friend. How did we ever grow so far apart?_

The batarian had removed his helmet to reveal his face. As his eyes slowly rebooted, he saw the top right eye was missing, replaced by a single livid scar that ran across his olive-green skin like an arrow._ Knife?_ Garrus thought muzzily._ Too thin to be gunfire. Knowing batarians, though, could be anything. Even their spoons are sharp._

"I want those codes," he said, going down on one knee to look Garrus in the eye. "You have the codes. Tell me where they are or I start hurting you."

"Start?" Garrus said, feeling his teeth with his tongue. They were all still there, at least. That was something. "That was just a friendly greeting, was it?"

"You could say that," the batarian said, leaning in close.

"Then allow me to respond in kind," Garrus said pleasantly, and kicked the batarian in the face as hard as he could. The iron-hard sole of his boot _crunch_ed beautifully against the batarian's face and yellowish blood flowered outwards from his wrecked nose.

_One given is one returned._

The merc collapsed backwards in a heap without crying out, his pistol flying away to clatter against the opposite wall. That yellow blood had spilled down the front of his scarlet armour, and was still pumping out of his nose and across his face like a miniature fountain.

The krogan looked down at his fallen comrade and then back to Garrus.

"Nice kick," he said admiringly. "I haven't seen anyone deck him with one hit before."

"Yes, he didn't take that well," Garrus said. The merc still hadn't moved, and a pool of blood was beginning to form under his head. _Maybe he's dead._ It was a comforting thought.

"He'll take this even worse," the krogan said, and shot him. The batarian's body twitched as the shotgun shredded his torso, punching through his armour like paper from that distance. A stray gobbet of blood splattered against Garrus's cheek and dribbled down, faintly warm against his hide. His head started to throb, harder than before. _OK, I think he's dead now. Is this a better situation, or a worse one? On the one hand, you've got a batarian who wants to torture you. On the other hand, you've got a krogan, any krogan. Either way, it's still pretty bad._

The krogan turned back to Garrus and pumped his shotgun. _Just for show, of course,_ Garrus thought vaguely. _They haven't made a shotgun that needs pumping in a few centuries. They only keep that feature so they can be used to intimidate. As if a krogan needs to intimidate people._

"Idiot thought he could trust me," the krogan said contemptuously, and levelled his gun at Garrus. "Tell me where the codes are. Now."

"No."

The krogan chuckled, his laughter like sandpaper on metal. "You've got a quad, I'll give you that. But I want those codes."

"And I want a personalised battle-dreadnought," Garrus said, "but I'm not going to get it." Maybe a fleet of them. That'd be nice.

"But I want the codes, and I am going to get them."

"You'll need me to tell you where they are, and I'm not going to tell you," Garrus said, and spat out another mouthful of blue blood. It splashed onto the floor between his legs, gleaming in the light. "You think I'll let the likes of you get your hands on something like that?"

"It's a nice ship," the krogan said. "Maybe I'll take it for myself."

"I don't care if you take it or your boss," Garrus said. _Besides, I want that ship,_ a treacherous little voice said inside his head._ Good luck getting out of here alive,_ another one told it. "You could kill a million people with that before anyone could stop you. I'm not letting that happen. The codes stay with me until I can destroy that array."

"You'd destroy the array?" the krogan said, sounding genuinely surprised. "Why?"

"Because it's designed solely to kill a lot of innocent people. Strange as it may seem, I'm against that."

"It's worth a lot of money."

"To people who'd use it for mass murder."

The krogan considered this.

"A lot of money," he repeated.

"No amount of money's worth that."

_Hell, I hope I believe that._

"Hah. You turians," the krogan said. "Always so honourable."

"You krogans," Garrus said coldly. "Always trying to kill everything."

The krogan sighed.

"Tell me where the codes are, or I start shooting you."

"You're unusually reticent with your shots for a krogan," Garrus said. "Most of them would try that first, then ask questions of whatever steaming remains were left."

"It's your lucky day."

Garrus looked down at his blood on the floor, then shook his handcuffs. They were slightly too tight, the metal forcing his armour into the thick flesh around his wrists, but the movement must have caused some release. His fingers started to burn as the blood rushed back into them.

"Yes, I can see that," he said._ I think I remember why I hate Omega so much._

"But not that lucky," the merc said. "Last chance. Codes, or I blow off a leg."

"That's the choice, huh?"

"Yeah."

Garrus chuckled softly to himself. _This is not going to go well. End of the line, huh?_

"Make it the left one," he said. "I like the right one."

"Fair enough," the krogan rumbled. There was a flash of movement over his shoulder. Then his head exploded.

_Interesting._

The doors had sprung apart faster than the eye could track to reveal two turians in full combat armour. Both suits glinted a dark grey, and their helmet visors flashed in the light as the krogan mercenary slowly toppled forwards to land with the brain-dripping remnants of his head between Garrus's feet.

_Very interesting._

"I compliment your sense of dramatic timing," he said.

"Free him. Quickly," the one on the left said, gesturing with her assault rifle. It was definitely a her, as well, her voice a commanding soprano, though he couldn't tell from the armour. Hell, it was hard enough to tell apart the turian genders even without the armour.

The other one was holding a sniper rifle, a nice model. Very slow fire rate, but more than made up for by sheer firepower. He had to have been the one who'd shot the krogan. A weapon like that could probably have put a good-sized hole in the door even if it hadn't opened. He shouldered it, then darted over to Garrus and roughly turned him around to get at the handcuffs.

"Quickly, Sidonis," the other one warned, training her rifle down the corridor outside. "Ninety seconds at best."

"Don't rush me," Sidonis snapped, and pulled something from his belt. Garrus was too turned around to see, but the hiss of gas and sudden burst of heat a few centimetres from his hand was enough to let him know that Sidonis had some kind of miniature blowtorch. His own shadow suddenly appeared on the wall in sharp relief.

"As much as I appreciate the whole rescue thing," Garrus said, as the metal links began to twist and melt in the scorching heat, "who are you?"

"Time for that later," the female said. "Now, we need to get out of here."

"Agreed," Garrus said, and the chain shattered, white-hot fragments whining away and embedding themselves in his armour. The rest of the handcuffs went with them, and blood roared back into his hands.

_Ah, sweet freedom. I'd forgotten how wonderfully vindictive you are._

"Crap," he said, flexing his fingers. "Pins and needles. And broken glass."

"You OK?" Sidonis said, and extended a hand. Garrus took it, the fingers thankfully numbing themselves to the pain, and yanked himself up from the floor.

"I'll live."

_For now._

"Move it," the female said sharply. "Where are your weapons?"

"They took them when they ambushed me," Garrus said. "Probably on the main floor somewhere. We can find them-"

"No time. Take this," she said, and kicked the batarian's lost pistol towards him. He stooped to pick it up.

"You know, those guns were expensive," he said pointedly. "I'd quite like to get them-"

"Buy more." The female turned her back on him and opened the door up again.

"Listen, who-"

"Chirin. Sidonis. Friends. Move."

_Not the talkative type, eh? Still, mustn't complain. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. At least, not when the giver is watching. Look later, and make sure you're armed._

She set off down the corridor at a sprint, and Sidonis followed her. Garrus stepped gingerly over the krogan's headless corpse and followed them. He couldn't help but notice how shapely her hips were under that grey armour as her legs pumped. _Stop it, Garrus. No attraction until you know this isn't a trap. Down, boy._

They came to the end of the hall, and Chirin mashed her hand into the door panel without even slowing down. The door detected the speed she was running and slammed open, just in time for her to barrel through at full speed. Garrus followed, and his mouth fell open.

The bar was decimated. Everything in sight had bullet holes in it. Even the lights were hit, only five or so of the red fixtures still glowing, casting half of the room into deep shadow. The air was thick with the sour, metallic smell of five species' blood mingling on the floor. There'd been about twenty people in the bar when he'd come in, most of them mercs of one kind or another. Now, there were still about twenty people. They were just breathing less.

"Hell," he said, breathing in sharply. "You guys really did a number on this place."

"We can't stay here," Sidonis warned. "There'll be reinforcements coming any second." He ran after Chirin, who was already by the exit. Garrus followed, his boots splashing in the cloying blood. It was an odd brownish colour, the red of human, the blue of turian and the yellow of batarian, the orange of krogan and the dull vermilion of vorcha mixing to create something that wasn't any of them. The smell was overpoweringly strong, far more potent than the one in the side room, and he felt a wave of warm, thick nausea wash through him like dirty dishwater. _Who are these people? This is professional. Matching uniforms, killing two dozen mercs between them... and they're here for little ol' me. At least they don't seem to want me dead._

He was vaguely aware that his fingers were still aching like hell, wrapped around the handle of the pistol like limpets. Blood was still leaking into his mouth from a cut he was only starting to feel, and he was sure that damn krogan had put another crack down his face. _Still, what's one more? Never was in mint condition._

He took one step towards the door and almost fell as his boot skidded out from beneath him, trailing drops of blood that gleamed in the red light as they flew.

_Think, Garrus. Are you really better off with these two? You don't know what they want with you. At least the Blood Pack was nice and upfront about the whole 'torture for information' thing. These two... they're something else. Better. I couldn't take them, not together, not with a piece of crap like this. I go with them, I stay with them._

_On the other hand, they seem to think Blood Pack reinforcements are showing up any minute. Somehow, I don't particularly want to be here when they do, although it would make me look pretty damn badass. Maybe they'd be so impressed they'd let me go. And maybe Shepard will come back from the dead. Maybe I'll give up this whole vigilante shtick and become a fringedresser._

_Damn it. No options._

Chirin was already through the door. Sidonis stood in the threshold, beckoning urgently.

Garrus sighed, and went.

_Why is nothing ever easy?_


	2. Alpha And Omega: The Car

**ALPHA AND OMEGA**

**TWO: THE CAR

* * *

  
**

The air outside the Kalendis Novembris club was dully stale, the kind you got from recycling the same artificial gas ten thousand times, but to Garrus it might as well have been fresh off a Palaven nature reserve for how good it smelled. The stench of blood was still worked into his nostrils, but at least now it was lighter, more manageable. He took a couple of deep breaths. They made the pulsing pain in his head scream out again, but he barely noticed, forcing the pain away. It was an old soldier's trick, focusing on the centre and isolating it, blocking it away until it was just another warning bell ringing in his head.

_Note to self: wear a helmet next time you're abducted by thugs and beaten for information. It might help._

"Vakarian."

The word wasn't spoken loudly, but there was an air of command in it that cut through the ambient sound of Omega, the usual hum of traffic and distant machinery like a neutrino through plasma.

_She's in charge. That's a commander's voice if I ever heard one. Ah, strong women. Not that there are really any other kind with our species._

He looked up to see Chirin standing by an aircar parked haphazardly on the flooring twenty metres away. It looked like they'd almost crash-landed; the grey paint on the bottom - grey, same as their armour - was scratched and torn, while a deep groove was dug into the metal for a few metres behind. A crowd of bystanders was already starting to congregate around it. It was a miracle it hadn't been stolen already, this being Omega.

_Well, here's the sixty-four thousand credit question, Garrus. Do you: a) go with these strange professionals who could probably kill you at a moment's notice and whose motives for saving you you have no idea about, or b) make a run for it?_

_What do I do? Walk into the darkness, or scuttle about in the shadows? If I leave them - assuming she doesn't shoot me down, of course, and I'm not entirely confident of that - what's to say the same thing won't happen again? There won't be anyone to save your scaly ass next time._

_But will there be a next time?_

_Oh, there will._

_..._

_Damn._

_Well, what's life without a few surprises?_

He shouldered his way past a couple of salarians and pushed aside a human to reach the car. Sidonis was already inside, sitting in the driver's seat, and as he approached Chirin swung herself inside.

_She'd never get you now,_ a little voice inside his brain urged. _You could melt away and be your own man again._

_Shut up, brain. I knew I couldn't trust you._

He ducked under the door and sat down, taking the second back seat. It was roomy inside the car, and when the door came down the murmur of the crowd outside and the perennial background hum of Omega were cut right off._ Nice model. These guys are well-equipped._

"Told you he'd come. One hundred credits, Lant," Chirin said.

"Fuck you," Sidonis grunted, and flicked a credit chip over his shoulder. Chirin caught it neatly and slid it into a pocket on her armour.

"Only a hundred?" Garrus said, buckling his seatbelt. He noticed Chirin hadn't bothered to do the same, but then again that armour could probably handle a car crash easily enough.

"What can I say?" Sidonis said. "My girlfriend always said I was frugal." He yanked back on the throttle, and the aircar's engines throbbed underneath them. The crowd suddenly shrank away as the vehicle bobbed up twenty feet and slid away into the shadow of a starscraper to join the traffic lanes.

"Out of interest," Garrus said carefully, "what would you have done if I'd run for it?"

"Missile to the small of the back," Chirin said. She didn't appear to be joking.

"Right," Garrus said.

There was a short pause, which Sidonis broke by clearing his throat loudly in the traditional ritual of bypassing something awkward in the conversation. "That went well," he said, sounding mildly cheerful.

"Speak for yourself," Garrus said, feeling his faceplate tenderly. "Some day, this thing's gonna fall right off."

"Not soon, I hope," said Chirin. Sidonis had taken off his helmet but hers was still in place, the opaque visor blocking any eye contact. "We have work to do. Seems that might be difficult without a face."

"Yes, I've been meaning to discuss that," Garrus said, and put down his stolen pistol on the seat between them. Outside the tinted windows of the aircar, the high-rise buildings of Omega flashed past. "Work, that is, not my face. Although, if you're particularly interested in it-"

"Don't even bother," Sidonis said, voice weighed down by the universally recognisable burden of experience. _I thought you said you had a girlfriend? Not doing a great deal to win my trust here, Sid._

"Questions can wait until we're out of the system," Chirin said, ignoring him. "The Blood Pack won't let this go easily."

"They might even kill us," Sidonis said brightly. "That'll be fun."

"Out of the system?" Garrus said. "I can't go out of the system. My work's needed here."

"Ever heard of modesty?" Sidonis muttered.

"Your work nearly got you killed," Chirin said, with all the concern as if she was reminding him of a dentist's appointment.

"Yes, I was going to ask about that as well." He shifted his position so that he was staring right at Chirin. "First: where are we going, and why?"

Chirin turned her helmeted head away to stare out at the flickers of light behind the glass.

"First, we're going to the spaceport. We need to get off this station, and you've got our ticket out."

"Ah."

_The ship. Everything comes down to the ship. What kind of galaxy is this, where people fight and die over who gets to commit genocide?_

_Well, this kind, obviously._

Sidonis flicked a switch on the console in front of him, presumably sending the aircar into autopilot, and turned to face them. For the first time, Garrus got a good look at his face; he didn't recognise the tattoos, which were pale blue and less substantial than Garrus's own. _Looks like Aspian, but I don't think the colours are right. I hope they aren't, anyway. As I recall, we did some rather nasty things to them in the U-War, and we do love to hold a grudge..._

If he was planning on murdering Garrus for the honour of his clan, Sidonis didn't seem to be showing it. He looked fairly young, no more than mid-twenties, maybe as young as late teens. _Handsome, too. _

"That ship," Sidonis said, "is worth a metric fuck-ton of credits."

"That an exact measurement?" Garrus said, smiling thinly. The side of his face tightened painfully, and another trickle of blood seeped into his mouth from the cut there.

"Fuck yes it is," Sidonis said. "And guess who the lucky turian who just so happens to have stolen the only set of codes to it from the Blood Pack is. Three guesses, first two don't count."

"And the Blood Pack took it off a human entrepreneur, who took it from an asari businessperson, who stole it from someone else," Chirin finished.

Garrus cocked a brow ridge. "Someone else?"

"We don't know everything," Sidonis said. Behind him, the vista from the windscreen turned sharply to the left as the aircar cornered. He wouldn't even have noticed if he hadn't seen it. _Now that's inertial compensation. Perhaps I should have some built into my face. It might take less damage that way._

"There are at least eight identified parties after that ship," Chirin said, "and most likely at least twice that many total. We've confirmed Blood Pack, obviously, as well as the other major merc groups - Blue Suns, DiamondEye, Eclipse - plus three private operations, almost certainly run by local plutocrats. Unconfirmed interest from Forty-Four, the Crows, Stranglehold, Marcus Ladstock, Yarin - and Aria, of course, but we're willing to believe she'll stay out of this and let it end itself. She doesn't go in for intervention."

Garrus rubbed a hand down his face, wiping away some of the blood congealing there in a blue smear. _Match the tattoos._

"Crap. I thought it was just the Blood Pack who stole it from the creators. That's what they seemed to think, anyway."

"It's bigger than that. A lot bigger," Sidonis said. "Everyone with hands and a brain on Omega - and that ain't everyone, bear in mind - wants a piece of the pie. We're talking more credits than can physically fit on a chip. After all, that ship can seriously fuck up a lot of people's days."

"Tell me about it. Unprotected colony world meets that kind of biological weaponry... it'd kill all of them, and it could be out of the system before anyone even knew something was wrong," Garrus said, and leant back to stare up at the car's roof. "Untraceable. Uncureable. Unstoppable. Control that, and you've got the biggest hostage in the history of the galaxy at your fingertips." He rubbed his right eye with the back of his hand. It was already swelling up. "Maybe I should just hide."

"Wouldn't work," Chirin said. "Once word got out that they've disappeared, we get a little war of our very own. Nobody's broken into the ship yet, but that's only because every damn merc group in the Terminus Systems is hanging around that ship like a group of heavily-armed flies."

"Someone tries, a lot of people get fucked," Sidonis said, "but someone has to win, and they'll get in eventually."

"So our only hope," Sidonis continued, "is to rain on their parade. We have you, you have the codes, the codes have the ship, ergo we have the ship."

"Let's talk about this 'have' thing," Garrus said. "You don't 'have' me. I don't even know who you are. I know names, names that might not even be real, but that's it. Who do you represent? Don't tell me you're on your own, this is..." - he waved an arm around the car - "...professional."

There was a second or two of silence.

"Those are our real names," Chirin said, and turned back to him. He couldn't read anything, anything at all into that calm, smooth voice, and without any facial expression to go on talking to her became slightly unnerving.

"Well, that's nice, but who are you?" Garrus said. "Forgive me, but I don't think giving the keys to the genocide machine to enigmatic mercenaries is-"

"We're not mercenaries."

Chirin's voice could have frozen water.

"Then what are you?"

"Colleagues," Sidonis said.

"Colleagues," Garrus said flatly.

"Colleagues."

"Little more specific?"

Sidonis sighed, and cracked his knuckles.

"Vigilantes. Outlaws. Outsiders. Men of the night. Bastards. Whatever the fuck you want to call us, that's what we are."

"Men of the night?"

"I think I heard that somewhere," Sidonis said vaguely, waving a hand. "Probably wasn't serious, but I like it. Air of mystery."

"Lantar, you've got all the mystery of a bad film noir," Chirin said, her tone still unchanging.

"Fuck you," Sidonis said, and a wide grin flashed across his face like a fish through water. "Fuck you very much."

"Vigilantes," Garrus said sceptically, trying to steer the conversation back on track.

"The very best," Sidonis said, and thumped a fist into his armoured chest. It made a dull thud.

"Yeah? I'll bet."_ Lantar. His prenomen is Lantar. Must make a note of that._ "Still doesn't explain the uniforms. Or the equipment, for that matter. Anyone who saw the two of you together would say you're mercs. I still think you're mercs. You can't tell me you're just a couple of well-dressed vigilantes. I'm not going to buy that."

"We-" Sidonis began.

"We aren't mercs," Chirin said, cutting him off. Sidonis rolled his eyes and looked away, out of the window at the vast light show that was Omega. "But we were."

_Ah. There it is. The truth comes out. What were you expecting, though? It's not as if people see 'crazed vigilante' as a valid career choice without a past like that. I should know._

"Did you hear about the, ah, the _incident_ up in Sunwise a week ago?" Sidonis said, as the car swooped neatly around another corner to join a new lane.

"There are more _incident_s in Sunwise than there are people," Garrus said, with all the weariness brought on by detailed first-hand knowledge of exactly the sort of incident usually involved. "Hell, I'm probably involved in a good ten percent of them. And that was when the ship surfaced, wasn't it?"

"The day before the broadcast of the technical specifications of the ship across the station," Chirin confirmed. "We were lucky, really."

"Yeah, everything was pretty chaotic. So no, basically," Garrus said.

"Let me refresh your memory," Sidonis said. He made a fist out his right hand and brought it up, then opened it. "Boom."

"B- that was you, huh?" said Garrus. _Now, this is interesting. Not in a good way, though. Very few things are interesting in a good way on Omega. May you live in interesting times indeed._

It had been a week ago. A normal day up in the Sunwise district, which essentially meant open warfare. Aria tended to have it left alone by her enforcers. Give her credit for that, at least; she knows when not to fight a losing battle. The world without law has its own outlaw district. _Ah, irony. What a dull universe this would be without you._ An explosion had rocked it - hardly unusual for Sunwise, but this one had taken out a series of warehouses and office buildings. Garrus hadn't been there, but he'd seen a few grainy vids on the extranet. It had looked fun. Casual estimates said that two or three hundred people had died, but nobody had claimed responsibility. It had obviously been an inside job, too, the buildings apparently having been rigged to blow from the interior. _Professional._

_But that was just a blip in interest, wasn't it? An explosion, a few hundred dead... all in a day of work for the good people of Omega. But the very next day, an anonymous ship broadcasts specifications that make it the most valuable thing on the damn station... it might as well be a dare for those good people to try and claim it. Maybe it was. Hell, I'm going for it.  
_

Sidonis didn't answer right away. He glanced over at Chirin, who was as unreadable as ever. He seemed to get some kind of signal from her, though one that Garrus couldn't see.  
If I had my visor, maybe I'd be able to see through that damn helmet. The area around his eye felt - well, above all it felt painful, the krogan's shotgun leaving one hell of a bruise under the plating, but it also felt naked without that visor. _I'd had that one five years. Those things are expensive, too._

"Have you ever," Sidonis said, leaning forward, "heard of Vult?"

"It... rings a bell," Garrus said slowly._ Where the hell have I heard that name before?_

"We were mercs. A higher class of mercs, if you like."

"There's no higher class of mercs," Garrus said. "A merc is a merc."

"Yeah? Whatever," Sidonis said, shrugging. "Point of the matter is, we ain't. Not any more. That bridge burned, then blew up. Along with twelve buildings and a few hundred people." He caught Garrus's expression. "I mean, they were mercs too, mostly. No innocents. I hope."

_Like there are any innocents on Omega,_ that voice spoke up again, in the shadows at the back of his mind._ Wouldn't it be better if this whole place was dusted?_

He forced it back, back into the darkness, but it wasn't going to stay.

"Vult worked on contracts that required a more finesse than the usual," Chirin said. Garrus might have been imagining it, but her voice seemed to have frosted over again. "Most of the time, clients only need cannon fodder-"

"-which the Blood Pack and their kind are only too eager to offer," Garrus finished.

"Tactical infiltrations, espionage, demolitions, assassinations... anything that couldn't be done by a hold full of armed fuckheads, we did," Sidonis said. "You know what I'm talking about. You did the same thing, after all."

Garrus bristled. "I never-"

"Never thought in such small terms?" Sidonis said sharply. "You couldn't just infiltrate, you had to destabilise the entire colony. You couldn't just demolish, you had to fucking nuke the facility."

"We did what we had to do." That was said with conviction. _I know that's right. Shepard always did what was necessary and no further._

"What you fucking had to? Give me a break. You're the same as us, you and that Shepard bitch both-"

Garrus punched him.

There were a couple of seconds of silence, with nothing but the throaty hum of the engine beneath them filling the car. Garrus's knuckles began to sting like hell.

"Fuck," Sidonis moaned, feeling tenderly around his jaw. A trickle of blue blood was running down from one corner of his mouth.

"Some day," Garrus said, "everything Shepard did, everything she fought for, everything she stood for - it'll all come out. Read the reports. Watch the vids. If you still want to insult her after that, you can return that with interest."

"Fuck," Sidonis repeated. "Fuck, I think you broke my jaw-"

"Man up," Chirin said blandly, and turned back to the window.

"Man u- I risk my life to save your ass and you, you assault me?" Sidonis said, fixing Garrus with a steely stare of equal parts outrage and disbelief. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"Shepard saved your life, mercenary," Garrus said, and his voice made the steel in Sidonis's eyes look like paper. "If you value it, I suggest you be thankful to her."

"I don't know if you heard me, but we're not fucking mercs!"

"You work for them, you're one of them. Mass murder isn't going to change that."

"What the hell do you want?" Sidonis said, and spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor between Garrus's feet. "What the hell do you want from me? If we hadn't been there to bail you out, you wouldn't have the ability to walk!"

"And if Shepard hadn't been there on the Citadel, we'd all be dust."

Sidonis gave him one last withering look, then twisted back to the front seat, turning his back on Garrus, and stared fiercely ahead as the aircar entered a slow lane.

_Perhaps I shouldn't have hit him. It may not have been a good idea to piss off one of the two people capable of getting you off this station alive._

_Then again, he was being a real dick._

"All he says is true," Chirin said quietly, still studying the view flashing past the window. She hadn't moved in a good minute.

"So you're mercs."

"No. We were mercs. Now we're unemployed."

"And I bet unemployment benefits aren't up to scratch on Omega."

"Nobody stays out of work for long here," Chirin agreed. "As long as you count crime as work."

"So, I take it I'm to believe that you two just want to get out of the system, and have absolutely no ulterior motives regarding this extremely dangerous, massively valuable ship I have the only codes to?"

"Yes."

"No offence," Garrus said, "but that's a load of crap."

"I see your point," Chirin said. "You don't trust us. We don't trust you. But we each have something the other needs."

"Somehow, I think my need is just a little more urgent."

"Just because you've got the Blood Pack on your ass?" Sidonis chimed in, still not looking back at them. "The Blood Pack are fucking amateurs compared to Vult. We knew that. That's why we left, that's why we left as many of the bastards dead as we could. But we didn't get all of them, not by a long shot. There's a scorpion tail of Vult operatives on the station, and let me tell you - they are fucking pissed off."

"Not without good reason," said Chirin. "We shattered their entire infrastructure. They've already lost most of the outstanding contracts they had. Shortly put, we killed them."

"I'm having trouble believing that Vult was up to all that," Garrus said. "I've only heard the name a few times, for a start."

"We... they... were secretive," Sidonis said. At least he seemed to have gotten over the punch, although his tone was noticeably sharper, colder. "Black ops. Well, grey ops. It was word-of-mouth among contacts at the very highest level, working for the sort of people with more creds than skin cells. It's not as if anyone ever trumpeted it from the fucking rooftops."

"And presumably they'd be good?"

"The best." There'd been something in his voice as he said it, something more than mere fact...

_That was pride. I know pride when I hear it, even if he doesn't. Maybe he doesn't even know it, but he liked the prestige, the high demand. Still does. He's wondering if this is all a mistake, and I can't say I've done much to change his mind there._

_Interesting. You're one to watch, Lantar Sidonis._

"And if they're the best," he said, "how did two operatives bring down the whole organisation? Even for the most shambolic operation in the systems, that should be impossible."

"It was," Chirin said quietly.

_Ah._

"There were ten of us," Sidonis said, after a short pause. "Four turians, including the two of us, three salarians, a human, an asari, a krogan."

"And now..."

"And now, there aren't."

_Sore point. Not a good idea to press. Then again, hitting him wasn't a good idea either. Stealing the codes wasn't. Getting into the car wasn't. You're just bubbling over with genius these days, Garrus. Give yourself another ten years and you'll have more fractures than faceplate. If you live ten years._

"We knew there would be losses," said Chirin. "But we lost our ship, the money, the equipment... all we had left was this aircar and these suits."

"Don't play me for sympathy," Garrus said sharply. "Somehow, I doubt you left Vult because you were just too moral and upstanding for them."

"We did."

"I'll bet."

"It's the truth," Sidonis said, and turned back to them. A thin line of blue blood was still drawn down the left side of his face. "You think mercs are all monsters? There's... things, things we won't do." He paused for a second, breathed in deeply. "Things that I can't do, not for any amount of money."

"Not many," Garrus said. "Not many at all."

"Fuck you." Sidonis's mouth twisted upwards into a sneer. "Who the hell are you to tell me who I am? Is this your thing? You take people and you, you define them to your own godly standards? You're not a fucking hero."

"I know."

"Then don't act like one," Sidonis said, and turned away again. The blood he'd spat onto the grey durafoam carpeting the aircar glimmered in the harsh artificial light flooding through the windows.

Is that how I act? Is that really what I am? Maybe Shepard was a bad influence on me. She was a hero. What am I? A hanger-on? I put a bullet through Saren's head, but if not for her... would I still be wasting my life trying to fight crime with nothing but the law on my side? Do I have the right to call him right or wrong?

If I did, would I know?

"What's done is done," Chirin said. "The past is past. I don't pretend to justify what I was. What matters now is what I am, what we are. I'll tell you what we want: we want to leave Omega, to regroup, re-equip, then return. With enough people, we can make a difference. We can't end the mercs, but we can help."

"Admirable."

"We knew about you. We knew what you want. You're after the same thing as us, you're after an Omega without crime. It's not a realistic dream, but it's a dream we can work towards. The ship is just a means to an end. We want those systems destroyed as well. They cannot be allowed to fall into mercenary hands."

"And if that is what you want, I'd agree," said Garrus. "But see it from my perspective. I'm effectively the owner of the most valuable ship on the station. You want to get onto it. What are you more likely to be: two reformed mercs looking to redeem themselves, or two mercs looking for money?"

"If we didn't know about you, we might assume you're after that as well," Chirin said reasonably.

_Crap. Got me there._

He didn't answer, instead turning to the window again. Omega glittered outside, a sea of brilliant gems in the darkness. It was almost beautiful, in its way._ I know what those gems are, though. You can gleam all you like, Omega, but all you're doing is putting a shine on dirt._

_I can't trust them. They know the codes are gone forever if they kill me, they know I can delete them. Just because you're alive, just because they haven't tried to extract them from you - that's no reason to think that's not what they want._

_But you need to get off this station, that voice spoke up again, dark and sweet as Spurian treacle. Think about what they've told you. You know damn well that every merc within a few hundred light years will want that ship, you know they'll be there waiting. You know everyone knows that the codes are in the hands of a single turian. You know that the only way for you to live is to go with them. That's the only way out._

_And that's it, isn't it? You can delete those codes. You do that, you've got nowhere to run... but that ship can't hurt anyone. That's the hero's way, Garrus. You won't do that. You can't do that. You think you're doing the right thing? You think you're lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness, don't you? But that's not it at all. You're doing this for yourself. You can't enjoy your good deeds if you're not alive, after all._

_You're no better than any of them. At least mercs are honest. They want money. You... you lie. You tell yourself, you tell people you want a better galaxy, but you're too self-interested to actually do the right thing. And the best thing? To you, to a turian... there's nothing worse than that._

He couldn't ignore it. He couldn't block it out. The thoughts kept on slithering through his head, dark and damp and impossible to shut away._ That's not me,_ he wanted to scream,_ that's not who I am_. But who was there to scream at? Himself?

_Damn._

It would only take a few seconds. A few button presses on his omnitool, a confirmation, and the codes would be lost forever. And he'd be a dead man.

_I can't do it._

...

_I can't do it._

Would deleting them really put an end to thing, though? What if they found another way to use the tech? The way it was designed, that was theoretically impossible, but... _yes. There's always a chance. Deleting the codes would just take you out of the equation. If anything that makes it more likely that someone will use the weapons on that ship._

_Yeah._

_So why don't I believe myself when I say that?_

"Damn it," he said aloud, and shifted until he could look out of the back windscreen of the aircar.

The lane behind them was a roiling, heat-shimmering line of light, stretching back tens of kilometres, and traffic had slowed to a stately twenty-odd kph. Omega didn't have any central body to enforce traffic regulations, of course, but experiment had shown that allowing free flight caused chaos. The sky wasn't all that big, after all, not when made of metal. People on Omega were nothing if not savvy, and they knew that this was one rule it wasn't in their interests to break. Some people always skipped the lane and flew solo, but people didn't like that. Omega was perhaps the most weaponised place in the galaxy, so anyone leaving the lanes to save time might as well be painting a target on their cars. You never knew which buildings had SAM units mounted on them, after all.

There were dozens of the shining snakes winding across the sky. One was positioned barely fifty feet above the one they were stuck in, moving parallel to it. The traffic seemed to be moving more smoothly in that one, the cars managing a solid forty kph. By Omega's standards, that was near light speed.

_Don't think taking in the scenery will shut me up,_ the voice purred. He did his best to ignore it.

The faint shout of horns above him made him look up again. Something seemed to be happening in the lane above them, the spots of light shifting from their usual straight course to mill about as one of them left the lane. He saw a few shots fired from the window of one of them, luminescent flecks that flashed past the aircar as it descended. _Does he mean to join this lane? Good luck there._ He couldn't help but feel that he'd seen this one somewhere before, though it was too bright to tell what colour it was even through the tinted windows.

The aircar continued downwards, and Garrus shielded his eyes with his hand against the glare of the headlights. There was definitely something about it...

_Is it my imagination, or is he coming right at us?_

Chirin was saying something, but her voice faded away to a murmur on the edge of his hearing as the aircar matched speeds with their own, hovering ten feet above them and twenty back. A figure was leaning out of one of the windows, holding something... a tube of some sort.

With a start, he realised what had been bugging him. The body of the car was painted iron-grey.

_The same grey as this one..._

The tube flashed, and Garrus moved.

He twisted in his seat like a fish and dived forwards into the narrow gap between the two front seats, straining against his seatbelt. His right hand found the controls and yanked savagely, not caring about direction. Sidonis shouted something and tried to wrestle his hand away, but by then the autopilot had already been overridden and the car was beginning to hook left.

As it did, the aircar lurched sickeningly upwards as the missile caught it under the right-hand side. There was a tremendous bang and suddenly the air was full of the shrieking of shearing metal and the roar of pure heat. The whole right side of the car exploded inwards, the glass shattering and door crumpling as the fireball hit.

The car seemed to _flip_, the explosion lifting it into a complete barrel roll. Garrus, wedged between the two front seats, could vaguely hear Sidonis screaming something over the sudden whine in his ears, until the right front seat suddenly gave and he fell back into the rear seats. The rocket had dealt a massive blow to the side of the car, leaving a jagged hole near the front, and even as he collapses backwards he could see the seat slip out and fall into the permanent Omega night. Fire was still licking around the edges of the hole.

The car had fully rolled over before Sidonis managed to bring it under some semblance of control, falling out of the lane and starting to dive. Sidonis was still hollering something as he hauled back on the control yoke, but the words were lost to the air, if there had even been words in the first place.

As the car pulled sharply up, it slipped over to the right, Sidonis barely having enough control to keep it stable. Garrus started to roll towards Chirin and the other side of the car, but his seatbelt snapped him back and the floor of the car had suddenly become the wall. There was an ominous shriek of metal from the other side as Chirin fell heavily onto the door, and Garrus instinctively thrust out a hand for her. She grabbed hold of it just as the remnants of the door fell from its hinges and detached from the car, plummeting towards the ground eighty metres below. Garrus was jerked down by her weight, which must have been well over ninety kilograms with the heavy armour in the bargain. His seatbelt, not designed for this kind of strain, snapped, and Garrus began to fall towards the dangling Chirin, his hand still clutching hers. If Sidonis hadn't been able to jerk the car back to the left, they both would have fallen, but instead they ended up tangled together on the opposite side of the car. The whine in Garrus's ears began to fade a little, and he realised Sidonis was still saying something.

"-ck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck _FUCK_!" he was shouting, the car weaving wildly as he fought for control. Most of the right front side of the car had gone, ripped away by the main impact of the missile, leaving a smoking hole that looked out on the Omega starline. The right hand door had gone too, leaving the whole side open to the air. As Sidonis kicked the car up a few years and sped off, another missile, a gleaming blue ball of light shedding layers like an onion, whipped past barely five feet away on the right with a roar. And on top of it all, his mouth had started to bleed again.

_This is not turning out to be a good day._


	3. Alpha And Omega: The Chase

**ALPHA AND OMEGA**

**THREE: THE CHASE

* * *

**

_Pain defines us, in a way. Pain nerves firing, electrical impulses racing up and down your spine like wildfire. That's the same thing as sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell. I can look at a sunset and think I'm enjoying it, but all I'm enjoying is the pain being different, less severe. If you look at it like that, maybe it's not so bad._

_In another, much more pertinent way, however, it really is._

His head was on fire. The beating had started it and the missile fanned it; he'd smashed it painfully against the left-hand door as he'd fallen back, and then one of Chirin's durasteel-weighted legs had come crashing down on it like a hammer to the anvil. He could swear it had kicked up sparks from his plates.

"Shit!" came a cry from the remaining front seat. "SHIT!"

Garrus tried to haul himself up, but the car rolled again and they started to slide towards the gaping hole in the side. The lights of Omega danced like fireflies as the car weaved through the air, tracking blinding trails across his eyes as blood pounded in his head. He managed to bring an arm out from under him and his hand closed tightly the remnants of his seatbelt, the thin material creaking ominously under his weight.

"Fly-" he began, then spat out a mouthful of blood. Chirin was trying to untangle herself from him, her legs trapped under him as she steadied herself with the edge of the wound down the side of the aircar. Someone's blood was on her visor, glistening a venomous blue in the flashing light. _Probably mine. I've been leaving a lot of that around of late._

"Fly straight," he managed, just as the car banked left again and threw the two of them back against the other door. At least the thick armour was protecting them from most of the damage, and the sheer size of it made it that much harder to actually fall out. _If I hadn't been wearing it_, he thought vaguely,_ I'd be a nice blue stain on a street somewhere. Perhaps we should tell the humans it would help to bulk up._

"Oh, yeah! Thanks for the fucking tip!"

The car bucked violently and began to dive again, heading for the lower buildings.

"Sidonis!" Chirin said, and managed to drag herself out from under Garrus's legs, bracing herself against the remaining front seat. "Where the hell are the inertial dampeners?"

"Good fucking question!" Sidonis hollered back. Another blue streak burned a purple trail across Garrus's vision, this one even closer than the last. It was a couple of seconds, full of the engines' tortured whine and the sickening pounding in his head, before he heard it detonate against a building below, sending a sun-white flash up through the sky. The shockwave buffetted the aircar again, but by now he'd wrestled free from Chirin and was hanging on for dear life from a handle over the left door.

"Make yourselves useful and shoot them!" he continued, and slammed a gauntleted hand into a control on the dashboard. There was a short screech of shearing metal before the entire remaining top of the car detached itself from the main body and flipped away through the rushing air.

"Now we're talking," Chirin said, and drew her assault rifle from her back. She stood, swaying with the motion of the car, until her head and upper torso were in the open air. The muzzle of the gun flashed and spat, and a spray of light streaked out into the night.

Garrus pulled himself up, bracing against the frequent sharp turns. His hand went to his holster only to find it empty. _Crap. Must have fallen out. It'll be a few hundred metres away now._

"Sidonis!" he said, shouting to make himself heard over the electric rattle of Chirin's gunfire and the engine's howl. "I need your rifle!"

"Like fuck you do!"

_That doesn't even make sense._

"We don't have time to argue!"

"Then why are we arguing-"

The car rolled almost onto its side to dodge another incoming missile. It sizzled past a few metres to the left as Garrus was thrown back against the edge of the newly-made convertible. Chirin swayed but somehow kept her feet, popping the heat sink as she did so. The red-hot cylinder bounced onto the floor, and she slid in a fresh one.

"Sidonis, give him the rifle."

"No!"

"Lantar!"

_Hah,_ Garrus thought. _That takes me back. That was an instructor's tone, sure enough. Prenomen helps too. I like her._

"Fuck," Sidonis grunted, and pulled his rifle from around his feet. "You'd fucking better be careful with that."

Garrus took it from his outstretched hand, feeling the weight thoughtfully. _Big gun. I thought this thing was powerful, but just how much kick does it have?_

_Well. Let's find out, shall we?_

He brought it up to his shoulder. The stock had clearly been customised for Sidonis's own armour, which seemed to be slightly smaller than his; it didn't quite fit, but he managed to wedge the dull grey metal in tightly as the car rocked around him.

Painfully conscious of his missing visor and the thumping in his head, he brought the scope up to his eye. The compensators in the car seemed to have regained a little power, at least, which meant that he could actually stand up without the fear of being thrown around like a rag doll, but it still meant that the image of the pursuing car was shaky as all hell.

He concentrated, and the adrenalin began to race. Red-hot, electric tendrils stormed up through his head and strangled the oily, pulsing pain there, and the whole world seemed to glow a little brighter, move a little slower. The car danced in the scope even now, but it was at least in the scope: he could pick out the same iron-grey paint, the single figure standing up inside, ramming another missile home into the launcher as if in slow motion.

_I'd like to hit him. That would be nice. But realism must prevail. Instructors always taught us to aim for the centre of mass. Headshots are for showoffs, or for when you have enough time to be certain you'll make the shot. After all, there's few things that'll make you look stupider than missing a headshot. No, aim for the car itself. If I'm right about how much this thing can do, we might just be able to do a little damage._

The scope was zoomed in as far as it would go. To the side, he could see the rhythmic flash of Chirin's assault rifle, see the individual bolts of light - but that wasn't the kind of weapon you needed here, and no more than a fifth of the shots could even be hitting the car's armour. _And with that kind of power, you won't even get through the windscreen._

The shot was lined up. At least, as far as it could be in these conditions. His finger tightened on the trigger, and suddenly all the noise in the car - the staccato buzz of Chirin's assault rifle, the screaming engines, somehow still working after the punishment they'd taken, the roar of the fires still burning, Sidonis's cursing, the bass drum pounding in his head - melted away to nothing, and all there was was the slow **DUH-DUH-DUM**, **DUH-DUH-DUM** of his heartbeat. _Didn't Shepard once tell me humans only have **DUH-DUM**, **DUH-DUM**? Crazy human biology._

The rifle sang, and the kick drove him back a step, until his back collided with Sidonis's seat. The flash of the muzzle had been almost blinding, and the crack of the report needle-sharp. He'd seen the shot race away, a streak of white light burning like a comet against the perennial Omega twilight, and drill straight through the upper middle of the shielded windscreen like it was paper.

_That won't have hit anyone, but the power... you know, they say you can tell a lot about a man from the gun he shoots. Sidonis, you like power, I can tell that much. Willing to sacrifice ease of shot, efficiency and your own pain to get it, as well._

_Interesting._

He eased his shoulder around, trying to work off the worst of the recoil.

"Damn right!" Sidonis called.

"What?"

"I said, damn right!"

"What's right?"

"When you fired that shot, you shouted out 'impressive!' I'd say that's on the fucking money, eh?"

_Really? I don't remember that. Must have been an involuntary thing._

Sidonis didn't wait for an answer, but instead whipped the car up and over a solid, unmoving traffic lane with contemptuous ease. They were heading for the spaceport still, Garrus realised, but they'd been taking so many twists and turns as the car followed them that they were barely any closer since the first missile had hit them. That was the Iridion Operations starscraper to their left, hundred of windows twinkling with the harsh white light even at this hour; in fact, every building in sight was still lit up like a Christmas tree. _At least, I think they are. Kaidan never really explained that simile. Some sort of human custom, I imagine._

The pursuing car had started to trail a thin grey smoke, barely visible in the dark as it wove around the lane and followed. It didn't seem to have hurt its performance, though, so they were still a good deal faster; all that was keeping the gap between them manageable was Sidonis's flying._ Maybe I should introduce him to Joker some time. I'm sure they'd get along like an engine room on fire_. Garrus had a sneaking suspicion that the only reason they hadn't pulled away entirely and lost them was that Sidonis couldn't pull any particularly complex tricks with the roof gone, a gaping hole in one side and barely functioning inertial dampeners. Even so, they might have got away, but there was only so much to do on Omega for evasive manoeuvres.

"Is that Lomon, do you think?" Chirin said, looking back over her shoulder to Sidonis as another empty clip bounced onto the floor and rolled out of the open side of the car. "It looks like him."

"Lomon?" Sidonis answered, raising his voice as the car twisted in the air again and the engines shrieked. "I think he was in Central when the bombs went off. He should be dead."

"Agreed on that," she said grimly, and opened up again. Garrus shrugged and took aim again with the sniper, this time making sure to brace his foot against the front seat to absorb some of the recoil. It might have been his imagination, but the inertial dampeners seemed to be coming back online; certainly Sidonis's razor-sharp turns and dives didn't feel as jerky any more, leaving him able to keep his footing more easily.

When he focused down the scope, he could again keep the car more or less in the crosshairs. A second window seemed to have opened, and what was clearly an asari was leaning out, armed with what looked like a heavy pistol. He tried to focus on her, letting the muzzle flash guide his shot, but when he pulled the trigger the shot went wild, flashing away into the night a few feet away from her. He cursed, and ejected the spent clip. Even as he did so, their pursuers took advantage of an open patch of sky to close the gap to something near ten metres, and another missile would have done them for sure had Sidonis not caught sight of it in his rear camera and thrown the car hard to the right. Garrus snatched at the side of the makeshift convertible to steady himself and watched Chirin's stream of fire strafe wildly across the front of their pursuers. _The shields on that thing must be bloody strong. Then again, this one survived a near-direct hit from a missile, so I'm not exactly going to complain on that front._

"We're too exposed," Chirin warned. Her voice was barely audible over the fire and the engines.

"You want to drive?" Sidonis snapped. "Then you can fucking drive! But until then-"

He broke off as another missile hummed in after them, jerking to the left to dodge it by scant inches. Garrus could hear the paint on the car crackle in the searing heat of the ice-blue wreath whirling around the rocket. _Good thing they don't have homing missiles, eh? Ah, small blessings._

"Four km left!" Sidonis called._ Four kilometres? That's not good. They'll have us long before then. It's a damn miracle we're still alive in the first place._

"That's not good enough," Chirin said.

"Fuck you it's not good enough! Do you know how hard this is?"

"Find more speed, or we die."

"By which you mean, 'kill us or we die'. You think I can just press a fucking button and get some more speed out of nowhere?"

"You've done it before," Chirin said simply.

_Hah._

Garrus lined up another shot, the rifle swinging smoothly around to aim at the dancing shape behind them. It barked again, deafeningly loud next to his ear, and set off another wave of oily pain coursing through his head - but that didn't matter, because whether by chance or by skill the shot drilled straight through the dark armour of the asari, taking her in the left shoulder. Just before the twists and turns of the chase snapped the car out of sight behind another building, he saw her collapsing back into the car, a twinkle in the air below marking her falling pistol.

"Scratch one!"

"I think that might have been Kepara," Chirin said vaguely. "I always liked her."

"She was trying to kill us," Garrus pointed out.

"No reason you can't like people who try to kill you."

There was something different about Chirin in combat, Garrus thought, watching her reload again and seeing the muzzle flash reflecting off her visor. _She seems a lot more relaxed when she's trying to kill something. Good for her. I prefer music or a shower, but each to their own._

"Uh, guys?" Sidonis called. "I think we have a problem."

A high-pitched beep started to go off in the cockpit, barely audible over the rush of wind through the open side of the car and the engines. The engines which were suddenly sounding like they were coughing, the roar beginning to splutter and fail.

"A really fucking big problem!"

"What?" Chirin said, turning away from the back of the car. Their pursuers had lost a few dozen metres after Garrus had dropped the asari, but the missiles were still coming, albeit increasingly inaccurately. _You'd think these guys would be able to afford a homing launcher if they have this much ammo. I wonder how many people they've killed with stray fire?_

_And what if they did?_ that voice said, sweet as honey. _Tragedy. Only on bloody Omega can you mow down a crowd with an assault rifle and come out with a net karma boost. Don't try to tell me you don't believe that._

_Damn. Whoever knew my inner bastard would be so talkative?_

"We're losing fuel," Sidonis said, and Garrus was jerked back to the present by the brittle edge of panic in his voice.

"How much fuel?"

"All the fucking fuel!"

A missile came closer than usual, forcing Sidonis to jam the car into a short, steep dive to let the blue fire streak overhead like a comet.

"Can we get to the spaceport?"

Sidonis's hands flew over the console. Screens set into the dashboard glimmered with strings of glowing numbers, numbers that meant absolutely nothing to Garrus.

"I've shut off the leak, so... assuming pursuit speed... no."

"No?" Garrus said, turning back as well. "You mean we'll just fall out of the sky?"

"Well, not fall," Sidonis said brightly. "It'll start out as 'graceful glide', then progress to 'horrific fiery crash from which no living thing could possibly escape'. But the principle is the same, yes."

_Responding to danger with irreverence? Can't be healthy._

_Pot and kettle,_ the voice purred.

_...shut up._

"How close can we get?" Chirin said, and her voice was as calm and glassy as the surface of Lireon Lake back on Palaven. Garrus was impressed. Even Shepard didn't stay that cool.

"In- shit!" The car rocked as Sidonis rammed the nose to the left, another rocket coming horribly, horribly close to destroying the car completely. Garrus flailed and managed to grab hold of the top of the door on his side, barely keeping his feet. The open side of the car tilted up to display the dull grey 'sky' of Omega briefly before coming back down to show the luminescent cityscape again, and the engines screamed their disapproval.

"In theory," Sidonis continued, voice strained through gritted teeth, "we can get there, but only if we fly straight."

"Not a problem," Garrus said confidently. "We can deal with these guys."

"Yeah, you've been doing a fucking great job of that so far!" Sidonis snapped.

"If we land, they'll pick us off," Chirin said thoughtfully, and turned back to the following car. "I agree with Garrus. Make a beeline for it, and we'll do what we can."

"Boy, suicide's real fucking popular these days."

Chirin's rifle chattered and juddered against her shoulder, and another spray of light trailed the car. _I don't know what she thinks she'll achieve by doing that. Blind them, maybe?_

He raised the sniper rifle again and tried to get the wielder of the rocket launcher in his sights, but their pursuers had apparently got wise since he'd downed that asari; the car was constantly shifting position, miniature blue thrusters working around the base of the chassis to jerk it around his crosshairs like a fly. He fired a shot as soon as he thought he had one, but it missed by at least ten metres and sped off into a building on one side, leaving him with nothing but mild tinnitus and a bruise on his shoulder in return.

They were closing the gap again, now down to about fifteen metres. Another missile came at them, but this one was already off course and shot by ten metres astern. Sidonis was doing his best to keep the car's position unpredictable but, Garrus realised, with all the sickening power of a hard kick to the guts, they wouldn't be able to keep this up for more than a few minutes if they didn't go back to making sharp turns. Sooner or later, they'd be right on top of them, and even the man who'd missed so many shots until now would hit the target from there.

_Shit._

A mental map of Omega wrote itself across his mind. They still had a few kilometres to go and they were coming from the Forty Towers district, which meant they were coming up near Silverthorn...

_Silverthorn..._

_Is this really a good idea?_

_No. But look on the bright side. If you crash, well, you won't have much time to beat yourself up._

_And if I don't? This is going to cause massive psychological scarring, brain. That hurts both of us._

_Deal with it._

"Take the tunnel!" he heard himself saying. The pain in his head had returned, but now it was nothing but an impotent hum in the back of his mind. His vision felt somehow sharper than usual, his hearing keener, everything about him slightly tuned-up, operating at beyond a hundred percent. _This is how it feels to be Shepard._

"The tunnel?"

"Tunnel 12! It comes out right near the spaceport! If they follow us in, we can shoot them down!"

"Are you insane?" Sidonis spat. "We'll crash and burn and die! In that order!"

"We'll die if we stay out here!"

"Then at least we die in the open air!"

"Just bloody take the tunnel!"

"No! That sort of thing only works in piece-of-shit e-net films! We'll just die!"

They were interrupted by another fizzing stripe of blue humming past the open side of the car, inches away. Paint crackled.

"It's our only chance!"

"We've got plenty of chances to die!"

"Take the tunnel, Lantar," Chirin said, and that calm authority made Garrus's body automatically try to snap to attention. _I never knew you could be so attracted to a voice._

Well, I guess there was Tali.

"You always take his side," Sidonis said, and resignation hung heavy in his voice. He reached for the controls and the car's nose tilted down, sending them in a shallow dive towards the surface. The bright lights of the city rushed up to meet them, and the snare-roll of Chirin's assault rifle started up again. Garrus turned back in time to see the first of the white lines pepper the front of the other car, which had followed their trajectory perfectly. A couple of them even buried themselves in the chest of the rocketeer, but his armour was the same grey durasteel as Chirin's and Sidonis's. That kind of protection needed a lot more penetrative power to do more than put a dent in it. _But what else do you expect from mercs?_

The car's engines were still protesting even as they descended to just a few metres above the street. Suddenly, there were crowds of people under them, crowds that began to scatter and panic as the car lurched further down, almost clipping the street lights that perenially shone by the side of the walkway. Ahead of them was Tunnel 12's entrance, from here a black speck set into the side of a huge block of buildings that ran through most of Silverthorn and even into the Diamonds, a speck that was rapidly growing larger even as he glanced at it. They'd left the pedestrian walkways now and were skimming along just above the lanes of ground traffic, tracking one that led directly into the gaping black maw of the tunnel. Hundreds of rectangular metal shapes pulsed and throbbed beneath them, the roads glinting with a dim, dirty light, and a chorus of hoots and curses trailed them like a wake as they spluttered past.

There were dozens of tunnels drilled throughout Omega. Garrus had always found that oddly appropriate. _Can't have worms without tunnels._ They wove through the thickest blocks of buildings, remnants of whatever cycles of construction and decay had gone before, maintained as thoroughways for the ground vehicles of Omega. Aircars were vastly more popular, but they were expensive - and money was hard to come by on Omega. It left thousands upon thousands of vehicles on wheels, tracks or low-clearance lifting fields, electric beetles crawling beneath the flies. They used the tunnels to go where aircars couldn't.

_Well, not 'couldn't'. I hope._

The other car shot after them like a guided missile even as the tunnel entrance neared, and Garrus got off a quick shot with his borrowed rifle. It clipped the very left side of the front, nowhere near anything vital, but the chips of metal it blasted away felt like a victory.

"If I die doing this, Vakarian," Sidonis shouted, almost drowned out by the roar of the engines as they approached the entrance, "I'm going to fucking kill you!"

A wayward missile detonated into a vivid orange cloud to the left of them as it impacted on the side of the tunnel, and they were in.

It was dark inside.

Very dark.

Omega may have had a reasonable sky traffic system, but those who couldn't leave the ground didn't even have the luxury of lights. The tunnel stretched away into the distance, a vast acoustic sounding board that amplified every engine and every blast of a horn into a vast symphony of noise, walls illuminated with a constant flicker from the working headlights of the cars packing it. There were maybe three metres between the top of the ground vehicles and the patchwork metal of the tunnel's ceiling, a cramped, confused space of noise and darkness.

It might not have been so bad if the car was intact, but the gaping wound gouged throughout the side and the entirely disappeared top meant that there was absolutely nothing to dampen the cacophony outside. The noise flooded the cabin, rushing into the space the light had left, and made it impossible to distinguish anything from the constant chaos. His brain seemed to catch fire inside his head, beaten into a searing pulp by the hammering roar of sound, and the nightmarish flashes of light coupled with the crushing claustrophobia of the tunnel weren't exactly helping. _I haven't felt like this since Uiron. Who'd have thought krogan drinks could even do that to a man?_

Chirin was firing again, but even the sharp roll of her assault rifle was lost to the constant roar. The car was pulsing white from the muzzle flash, worsening his headache even further, and when he tried to bring his sniper rifle around to bear all he could see through the scope was that rapid random cycle of light and darkness, with individual details indistinguishable. Behind them, the pursuing car was still coming, its headlights burning a powerful white that would have been painful to look at even if he hadn't been wrestling with the mother of all migraines.

_This tunnel is only a few kilometres long, then we come out almost on top of the spaceport. We're going well over a hundred kph. Just a couple of minutes. That's all you need to survive._

Another missile came racing towards them, but both cars were constantly shaking, adjusting and shifting their positions in the horribly narrow space available. _Situation like this, you're bloody lucky if it even goes in the right direction. _The blue ball slammed into a wall to their right, the explosion curving off the surface in a savage burst of red heat that buffetted the car like a leaf in the wind. Garrus thought he might just have heard Sidonis screaming something over the maelstrom, but he definitely did hear the screech of metal and saw the spray of sparks cascade from the intact side of the car as it crunched into the left wall of the tunnel. He was thrown back towards Chirin and the open side as the car tilted, and the tunnel wall damn near clipped his head as he stumbled. _I smash my face against that wall at this speed, and Garrus never gets a date again,_ he found himself thinking, and the absurdity of it in the situation brought a harsh, rasping laugh from him that the rush of wind and sound snatched away.

As he recovered and the car bounced back into the centre of the tight space, still juddering wildly as Sidonis fought for control, Garrus caught a glimpse of the other car bursting through the orange cloud now covering most of the tunnel behind them, that figure still grimly leaning out of the window. _What the hell does it take to get these guys to give up? Do people really go this far just for revenge?_

_Or is there something more than revenge going on here?_

_Vult, if it's what they say it is, has the goods. Had the goods. They say they took that down. But why would a few ex-operatives risk their lives just to kill those who brought the company down?_

_And why do I think best at the worst possible times?_

He glanced sidelong at Chirin. Nothing was forthcoming from the blank visor. He looked at Sidonis. He was still wrestling with the controls, his mouth working apparently soundlessly. Nothing from him either.

_Intriguing._

Another missile came after them, but this one was even more inaccurate, missing them entirely and impacting below them in the flat bed of a delivery vehicle beetling along below them, sending it up in an inaudible fireball. A pang of guilt surged through him. That sort of thing happened, but that didn't make it OK. Even on Omega, civilians don't deserve to be dragged into our conflicts.

_And there I go again. Omega civilians... I automatically assume they're as corrupt as the worst of this place, but do I know that? Do I have the right to judge what I don't know?_

_No._

_What did dad always say? 'If you can't do something right, don't do it at all'... but that precludes compromise. It's a rotten universe out there, dad. You can't be the paragon all the way. Sometimes, the only option is to do what's wrong to prevent a greater wrong. The lesser of two evils... is that what I've become? People who are, for all I know, totally innocent... they're dying, here and now, so that I can live. Is that justified?_

_It has to be. I have to believe that. Otherwise, there's nothing, no point to it all. I need to live to prevent more death._

_Do you?_ the voice whispered.

_Yes._

_I do._

They'd been shooting down the tunnel for what seemed like hours, but it couldn't be all that much longer than a minute, maybe two. Time seemed to alternately slow and speed up around him, the cars and lights and sound flickering inside his head like a broken strobe light.

He closed his eyes, letting the blood-blue inside of his eyelids wash away the chaos outside. There was another huge bang, a wave of heat that blasted away the sweat that had been carried to the outside of his exoskeleton, and the car rocked again. He barely felt it, and the explosion seemed to fade away to nothing even as it battered the car. The floor's vibrations and shaking seemed to stop, and even the rushing wind in the tunnel dropped.

_There's only death on offer here. We die. They die. Either way, a lot more people are going to die. I've killed more than I've saved, I can't deny that. Does that make me evil? I tell myself mercs are scum, that they don't deserve to live, but most of them just take their orders and fire their guns for money. I did that with C-Sec - hell, I might as well be doing it now, but without that little sheen of legitimacy, what am I but a murderer who thinks he's better than all the other killers out there?_

_You don't even think that,_ came the reply._ You know better._

_You're right. I'm right. I may be no better, but if what I do brings about a better world, if right can come from wrong, I'm happy to let my soul shrivel and die._

_But not your body._

_Ah, but that's the thing. I'm a tool. A hammer can degrade, a hammer can decay - but it can still repair, it can still improve. If you throw it away the minute it starts to show wear, then you might as well throw away all the good it can do as well._

_There's always another hammer._

_And until then, there's this one._

His eyes snapped open, and everything slowed to a crawl. He felt his head turning, saw the end of the tunnel coming - a patch of darkness in the storm of light. _The darkness at the end of the tunnel. How fitting._ They'd be on it in less than ten seconds,_ nine, eight..._

He swivelled again, and the action felt so smooth and easy that he could only tell he'd moved from his shifting viewpoint, and suddenly his sniper rifle was coming up to his shoulder and the scope to his eye, and the green lines of the crosshair seemed to hover perfectly still over the pursuing car.

_I'm not doing this. This is.. this is a dream. It has to be._

He let the crosshair gently drift towards what would be the driver's side. Exactly where the pilot's head would be.

And then he realised, the thought coming in one vast rush, a tsunami in the calm.

_I'm not doing this. This isn't me aiming a gun, this won't be me pulling a trigger. I'm the conduit, but I'm not the instigator. A river can't choose it's course. A hammer can't choose what it falls on._

_Good,_ chuckled the voice. _Good. Now you're learning. It's not about you any more than it is about any one of the hundreds, the thousands you've put an end to. All there is is action, a galaxy of tools doing what they must for whatever will follow._

_Let the hammer fall._

His finger curled and, for half an instant, he actually felt the rapid, burning heat spread up the gun and fade away as the thermal dump systems kicked in.

He could have sworn he'd seen the shot fly.

_Right is right, wrong is wrong. Shepard taught me that. But is that all there is to it? Wrong deeds giving birth to the right results... yes. That's what I must do. I'll do what has to be done, no matter what the cost._

_Will you? Will you really? Can you overcome that sense, that feeling, that little reminded, burning like a candle in your mind? Can you disregard your own morality for the greater good? More importantly, will you?_

_..._

_Yes._

_I will._

_I will and I did._

The windscreen of the car shattered inwards from his shot, blunted shards of the safety glass spinning like a kaleidoscope. He knew, without looking, that the shot had been true. The pilot was dead.

Immediately, the car began to haul sharply leftwards, and the nose sank until it was aimed almost directly at the traffic below. He saw the moment of impact, saw the metal crumple as it collided with the back end of a vast tanker truck, and suddenly sound came rushing back as they both went up in a world-shattering crash of fire and noise.

_Lives, snuffed out in an instant. Some mercenaries. Some civilians. They died so that I might live._

_I must accept that._

_I must._

The shockwave pulsed outwards, and the car was suddenly racing an orange wall of flame and death for the exit, and the engine was howling and the wind deafening, the heat immense, Sidonis's screaming harsh and loud...

And the still, small voice of calm spoke through the earthquake, the wind and the fire...

_Is this you?_

_Death for life. That's a trade you made. A deal like that can't be reversed. You'll have to live with what you've done, with the knowledge that your boots walk on the bones of others. Can you do that? Can you?_

He couldn't answer.

The car shot out of the tunnel like a cork from a bottle, trailing smoke and fire, a red-hot missile in the darkness. Bright tongues of orange flame licked out after it from the exit but they were already climbing, roaring up and away from the inferno, and Garrus felt a strange, rough laugh coming up from his chest. He let it out into the open air as the aircar climbed, the glittering jewels of the spaceport laid out a few hundred metres ahead of them.

_If this is the price of life, so be it._

"Hell of a shot, Vakarian," Chirin said, and was there the faintest trace of admiration in those glassily calm tones?

"Luck," he muttered, staring down at the rifle in his hands. "Just luck."

"Well, if we're all done with the congratulations and the horrific, stomach-destroying terror," Sidonis said, with ice-brittle cheerfulness, "I'd like to let everyone know that we're officially out of fuel."

There was a solid, mechanical-sounding_ CHUNK _from beneath them, and the splutter of the engine became more erratic still.

"Can we make it to the ship?" Chirin said.

Sidonis shrugged, and aimed the car straight for the spaceport. The air whistled around them as they picked up speed again.

"Might as well try. We're fucked either way."

"No," Garrus said suddenly. "No. We don't die here. We can't die."

"Oooookay," Sidonis said, as the car began to sink. "Well, Mr. God Complex, how do you propose we survive a spectacular high-speed crash?"

"Simple," Garrus said. "By not being in one."

"Oh," Sidonis said miserably. "We're doomed."


	4. Alpha And Omega: The Spaceport

**ALPHA AND OMEGA**

**FOUR: THE SPACEPORT**

_

* * *

Well, this is fun._

"Well, this is fun," Sidonis said. His tone suggested that the veracity of his statement could quite reasonably be called into question.

The car was descending. This was the goal, to an extent. Unfortunately, it was doing so with what could only be described as alarming alacrity.

Trailing smoke and sparks, both still roaring from the gaping wound in the side, the car was not so much flying through the glittering permanight of Omega as it was falling with style. _We'll never make it to the spaceport. And even if we do, we'll still crash and burn._

_Hm._

"Can't you glide her in?" Chirin said, without much hope in her voice.

"Yeah, see," Sidonis said, "this ain't a fucking ship. This is a car-"

The aircar bucked underneath them, and the engine's coughing fit intensified.

"-and cars don't _glide!_"

The nose of the car was starting to fall, despite Sidonis' best efforts to stop it from doing so - efforts that largely seemed to consist of swearing loudly. Garrus approved, in general terms. You let technology get too uppity with you and all manner of issues have a nasty tendency of sending your day to hell something bad. However, there were times when actual engineering knowledge was probably more useful.

"Patch a doublevid of the inner controls through to my visor," he said, leaning forwards towards the remaining front seat so that Sidonis could hear him over the racket. "I can try to-"

"What fucking visor, man?" Sidonis spat. His arms were juddering and shaking as the whole dashboard vibrated. Smoke had started to pour out of one broken control panel, and Garrus could see a technicolor tangle of loose wires hanging beneath it.

"My visor- oh."

_Damn._

He was suddenly acutely aware of the space on the side of his head where the orange tint usually hung. It felt oddly naked without it.

_Plan B, then._

"Forget it!"

He dived through towards the controls, knocking one of Sidonis' arms out of the way.

"What the hell-"

"Just keep her steady!" Garrus called, fingers flying across the panels with that special level of speed and precision only brain-melting adrenalin can provide. The spaceport was closer now, no more than five hundred metres away horizontally - but they were skimming along the approach roads at barely forty metres.

"Do you KNOW how hard that is?!"

"Shut up and fly, Lantar," Chirin said.

"Shutting up and flying, ma'am," Sidonis said sardonically. The fear seemed to have evaporated from his voice, Garrus noted idly. _I wonder if that's a good thing or not._

On the screen in front of him were dozens of figures, glinting blue on black. It was an old model of computer despite the modernity of the rest of the car; you sometimes got that in cars used by people like Vult, as the older models were never as susceptible to electronic warfare as the newer ones. That made things easier, at least. These days, they tried to make everything as flash and user-friendly as possible, which was all well and good for a family sky-trip but about as helpful as a frictionless grenade if you wanted to get to the raw figures.

Hard lines of code ran across his eyes like tiny blue elvers.

_I can do this._

_I have to._

"Sidonis!"

"What?"

"Dive!"

"Fuck you!"

"Put the car into a dive, now!" Garrus snarled. "It's the only way we're surviving this!"

"No, it's one of many ways we can die-"

"Just bloody do it!"

"Trust him," Chirin said simply.

"Oh, you two can both just go to hell," Sidonis said, and rammed the nose of the car down.

_And... now._

Garrus punched a button, and the code flashed white before disappearing into the ether. For a horrible moment, it seemed like nothing had happened, that they were about to find out exactly how hard the ground on Omega was - but then there was a hard, loud howl of air whistling up past the car, and their descent suddenly slowed to a crawl.

"We're not dead," Sidonis said. "Neat."

The car was coasting along now, perfectly level. Their speed had soared as the car had plunged, leaving them fairly humming along towards the spaceport. The vast array of light lay open before them, specks in the darkness marking the ships in the constant cycle of launches and landings.

"How did you do that?" Chirin said, with all the concern as if he'd shown her an interesting card trick.

"Deflector cushion," Garrus said. "These old models, you can get into the inner workings of the shields. I rearranged them to turn us into a sort of glider. Look." He gestured out of the open side, where a rough, transparent rectangle could be seen jutting out from the side of the car - a makeshift wing. "We should have enough lift to get us to the spaceport."

"Very nice," Sidonis said. "You owe me a new heart. I think this one may have exploded at some point in the last ten minutes."

"The ship's docked at Bay 652," Garrus said. "We'll need to move fast."

"I don't think that would be medically wise," Sidonis said with a shudder. "Dare I ask why?"

"Because, as you yourself told me, every merc group within about three thousand light years has a presence waiting outside that ship. Somehow, I have my doubts that they'll let us just walk up to the main door."

"You know, Vakarian, you're not a good person to be around."

"Yeah," Garrus said sympathetically. "I get that a lot." Sidonis touched the controls again, and the car began to swing around to the west, where the 600 bays were located. The vast hull of what looked like an old krogan cargo ship loomed grey and forbidding to their left; to their right, a sleek asari transport was humming down to land. Everywhere around them, audible even over the protests of the engine, there was the sound of a thousand starship engines murmuring into the night - and it was barely even night, the innumerable lights making it as bright as a Palaven day. _All the better to see us with._

They passed a few more ships - a massive freighter of some blocky design Garrus didn't recognise, what looked like a human vessel and a few more ramshackle krogan buckets - with the engine's splutter winding down even further. The makeshift wings he'd created were holding, but wouldn't for long. Their shimmering outlines were looking horribly flickery in the air outside.

Quietly, Garrus slung the sniper rifle over his shoulder and brought up the ship's codes in his omnitool. The instant he'd got them he'd run every encryption program he owned and a few he didn't, locking them tight under an internecine web of locks and bolts, but even they wouldn't hold up for long against a hacker who really knew their stuff._ And this ship carries something capable of making those sorts of hackers kings._

Chirin looked at him for a moment, visor as inscrutable as ever, then turned away.

_Can't blame her._

"We're coming in," Sidonis said. "Not a moment too fucking soon, eh? I'm reading... zero percent power."

"That's nice," Garrus said vaguely.

"Where do you want us down?"

"Not right up by the hatch. We'll be sitting ducks out there. Ever heard the phrase 'crossfire hurricane'?"

"No."

"It's exactly what it sounds like, and then some. Set us down somewhere out of sight, and we'll work it out from there."

"You got it."

They rounded the vast, smooth grey hull of a high-class asari pirate ship - the Inilia, is that? They ran that raid on Lestri Station last month, quality outfit - and suddenly bay 652 lay open in front of them.

The spaceport on Omega was the largest in the quadrant. There were well over four thousand spaces, all administered by the same automated star control system, EndLine Incorporated. They'd bought out all their competitors years ago, using the traditional Omega idea of buying out - total war. They catered to everyone and everything, from outlaws to Citadel business to merchants out looking for a quick cred to every damn merc in existence. They said that you hadn't lived until you'd been to Omega, and if you were still living afterwards then you hadn't lived properly. _I wonder if it's possible for the dregs to have dregs?_

Bay 652 was a few hundred metres of grey metal along each side, a vast landing square that could have taken all but the biggest dreadnoughts in the galaxy. The ship didn't take up anywhere near as much of it as Garrus had been expecting - it was the first time he'd even seen it past a few grainy images embedded with the codes to it. It wasn't even well-designed, an ugly nub of metal with all the aerodynamic ability of a potato and about the same aesthetic styling. Random struts of metal seemed to jut off at every angle, metal that varied from the usual pig-iron grey to a deep black to a rusted brown. It was shapeless, small, ugly, and capable of genocide.

Surrounding it, in a loose ring starting about twenty metres from the ship itself, were dozens of parked vehicles, everything from one-man aircars to full shuttles, and clustered together in small groups around them stood what must have been over a hundred small figures. Even from here, Garrus could pick out the weapons they carried under the glare of the tall lights away at the bay's corners. They were the flies to the rotting meat of the ship, the representatives of more groups than he could name. Garrus hadn't come this far without learning how to read a crowd from the way they carried themselves, the way they stood - you acquired that sort of skill quickly enough on the Citadel, C-Sec or not - and the atmosphere here was buzzing with a harsh, electric tension. You got the impression that there was already a firefight running through the minds of everyone on the ground, and that soon enough dreams would become reality. It wasn't a nice crowd, but the formless prize they were willing to murder and slaughter their way to made them look like a hanar Alcoholics Anonymous group.

The ship didn't even have a name. It was always just the ship. Something like that didn't even deserve a capital letter. It was... well, who knew? There were so many stories about its origins that you just couldn't tell. It was a Cerberus prototype stolen by the Council and somehow lost on Omega. It was a Council prototype stolen by Cerberus. It was a salarian weapon, the next stage of their genetic war against the krogan. It was Saren's, a remnant of his schemes left just so the son of a bitch could fuck things up from beyond the grave. It was Hierarchy tech, it was batarian, it was hanar. _I've heard every one of those and two dozen more, in bars and dives and markets across the station, and every one of them reeks of lies. The truth is that nobody knows where it comes from. Nobody can pick up the moment when it appears on Omega, no records show anything about it. All we know of it is that transmission it sent out a week ago, the tech-specs that drove every gearhead in the system into orgasmic meltdown, the threat of weapons we don't have anything to compare to - and the codes. Someone had them. Someone took them. Rinse and repeat a few dozen times until the only people who could ever have known where it came from are so much shredded flesh, left for the cleaners and the scavengers in bloody streets, until the only person in the galaxy who has the power to murder millions, potentially billions, with it is an ex-C-Sec turian who'd really rather stay home and get stuck into some really good calibrations._

_Hell, I don't even know if what they say about the ship is true. But they say that transmission couldn't have been faked, some techie mumbo-jumbo. Stuff so complex even I don't get it, all K-DN artifacts and half-jacquard turns in the coding. But it's real. That's all that matters. Advances in weaponry that can match the latest Hierarchy secret projects would be enough, you'd think... but this is Omega. That ship has a delivery system for biological weapons that can disseminate enough of a virus to wipe out a colony in hours, and that's the real prize. But you can't get in without the codes, and the specs transmission didn't have enough data to reconstruct the tech. So now we stand in the cold, rubbing our hands and plotting mass murder, waiting for someone's nerve to break and for the shooting to begin. Someone built this ship. I can't believe they'd simply lose it here, I can't believe they didn't mean us to know everything about it. Someone's playing some longer game here, a shadowy hand moving the pieces, and I don't like it one bit. But what choice have I got but to do what I can? If I don't, what does that make me? Too many people have died here, too many might still die. I don't get to walk away._

_I need the ship - no, we need the ship - to get out of this hellhole, at least for the time being. But I'll destroy those systems. I'll find the origin. And I'll kill whoever's responsible for this. This isn't a weapon of war; war can be justified. This is a weapon designed to kill in cold blood. No good can come of it, and it has to be destroyed._

"Um," Sidonis said, jolting Garrus from his reverie. "Um. Problem."

"What is it?" Garrus said, but he already knew. The deflector cushion he'd hastily erected was fading fast outside the wound in the car's side, the thin lines of air distortion flickering and almost cutting out.

The car began to sink.

It's always bloody something, isn't it? If it's not abduction and torture, it's a car chase; if it's not a car chase, it's running out of fuel; if it's not running out of fuel, it's running out of sky. The universe is an asshole.

"Right," Garrus said. "Right. Uh, change of plan."

The car wasn't quite diving, the makeshift wings were still keeping them up slightly - but only slightly. The engine had almost entirely died away, leaving an eerie silence in the cockpit. The rushing wind was suddenly far too audible.

"I don't think I can actually land this thing any more," Sidonis said. He seemed to have switched back into his glassy tone that apparently indicated a certainty that he was about to die. _I'm intimately familiar with that tone already. That can't be good._

"Crash-landing would be acceptable," Chirin said.

"Agreed," Garrus said, feeling ridiculous as he said it. The level of calm politeness in the car was surreal, but he had to admit it was better than a screaming panic. "Remember how I said we can't just land by the main hatch?"

"Why do I get the feeling that whatever you're about to say will make me want to kill myself?" Sidonis said glumly, and preemptively began to aim the car at the empty inner ring. A hundred metres horizontally. Twenty metres vertically.

"Well, life is cruel," Garrus said. "Bring us in."

Sidonis put on his helmet in answer.

It was not a good omen.

* * *

**AUTHORIAL NOTE: As my literally several fans might have noted, my updates have been infrequent at best. This is almost entirely due to my A-Levels sucking in more and more of my time like some sort of nightmarish cross between the whirlpool Charybdis and Heather Mills; however, I should be able to offer a conclusion to the first arc of this before the month is out. I'd initially intended this chapter to be longer, but time makes fools of us all, as they say. Still, something is better than nothing, right?**

**-TNP**


	5. Alpha And Omega: The Ship

**ALPHA AND OMEGA**

**FIVE: THE SHIP

* * *

  
**

_Oh, this is not going to be fun.  
_

The car smashed hard into the ground in a spray of sparks and a screech of shearing metal. Garrus was jerked forward into the space where the second front seat had once been, eveything suddenly a whirlwind of noise and sickeningly bright flashes. Something thumped heavily into his head and hot, blinding pain washed over him as the lights danced and the interminable sound of the car gouging deep grooves into the landing pad grew.

He felt the area around him start to shift, slowly at first, but then a sharp change in direction threw him towards anther surface, one his dim, fractured vision perceived as moving.

_That's not right..._

Then everything was a rush of cool, stale Omega air against his face and more chaotic movement, a glimpse of an armoured leg swinging past his vision, the sniper rifle he'd had over his shoulder hanging from his arm by its strap, a howl of metal, tearing and ripping - then pain, hard and unforgiving, skull bouncing off the landing platform like a ball, stars burning, burning brighter than anything he'd ever seen, the pain burning with them, hot and cold at once, darkness welling up-

_(duh-duh-dum)_

_duh-duh-dum_

_duh-duh-dum_

_DUH-DUH-DUM_

**_DUH-DUH-DUM_**

_My heart._

_Still beating._

_That's good._

_Or bad, depending on how you look at things. After all, you need to be alive to feel pain. An interesting variation on Descartes. 'I am in horrible, unending agony, therefore I exist'. A good philosophy. You'd be hard-pressed to find another so perfectly suited to the way my life seems to go._

He was aware these were not thoughts he should really be thinking right now. He continued to think them.

_I wonder if I'm dying. That would be nice._ The thought was cheering enough to rouse him a little, enough for him to realise that his face was slick with blood, the landing platform cold underneath it.

_That's probably bad._

He couldn't see.

_Hm._

_That's definitely bad._

Shapes began to fade in, still dark and incomprehensible. Movement. Flashes of light.

_That... could be bad, I suppose._

Sounds. Sounds that blazed paths of fire through his head, sounds that set off earth-shattering rounds of pain like Unification Day fireworks. Indistinguishable from one another.

They began to fade in. Shapes appeared in closer detail. Still fuzzy.

He was lying on his side, looking at something. Couldn't tell what. Something dark and glassy... or was a trick of the light?

He tried to move. He blacked out for a second.

_That's happening a lot these days._

Consciousness came back sharper than last time. Vision. Sounds. Pain, somehow even stronger than before.

_That's it. I'm having my nervous system surgically removed. I don't need it. We never got on anyway._

"Vkrn!"

That was what he heard, anyway. It didn't seem to be anything important, so he ignored it.

"VKRN!"

Still calling. Behind it, a barrage of other sounds, ones he couldn't hear anywhere near clearly enough to identify. Odd electric pops seemed to float in and out of the sea of noise.

"VAKARIAN!"

_Vakarian,_ he thought idly. _I wonder what that means._

In front of his eyes was blood. His own, probably, glowing a venomous midnight blue. Harsh lights reflected from its surface. Where the blood ended a sheet of metal began, then stopped. Then it rose at a ninety degree angle, only now without any of the smoothness of the flooring, torn and jagged under the glare of the spotlights. It took up his whole field of vision.

On the whole, there are worse things to see.

"-the fuck up or we're fucked!"

The word 'fuck' wandered vaguely through his mind like a lost child, interested by all the big sensations yet still searching for something safe, something it knows that it can connect to. It found another word. 'Sidonis'.

_Sidonis._

_Vakarian._

_Oh, hell. That's me, isn't it?_

And that was when things seemed to slide into focus, like a light being flipped on. Disconnected sensations and random thoughts slipped into place, and suddenly there wasn't just a sea of noise but distinct sounds - gun blasts, those pops had been, hundreds upon hundreds of them howling into the distance - and shouts, explosions. Screams.

His name.

"VAKARIAN!"

A hand pushed his torso upwards. He was vaguely surprised to find it was his own. His head came away from the ground, dripping blood, and tilted towards the source of the call.

An armoured figure was kneeling over him, the grey durasteel now scratched and pitted, its visor opaque. One long line ran across the centre of the glass, deeply gouged as if from some huge impact. The figure cradled an assault rifle, a mean-looking piece of tech.

Garrus tried to say something, but the instant he opened his mouth all that poured out was a foul-smelling mix of blood and vomit, gleaming wetly blue under the spotlights.

"Great," the figure said. "Just fucking great."

_Sidonis, then._

Retching and hacking, Garrus shoved himself up to a sitting position against the wall - except it wasn't a wall, it was the wreckage of their car, turned on its side and used as a makeshift barricade. The ship was in front of him - they were between it and the car. As he looked at the ship, dozens of high-energy bolts of every colour were hammering at it, but not in concentrated fire: all this was just collateral. The sheer size of the gunfight that had to be going on was staggering.

_Never a dull moment, eh?_

"Ugh," he managed, wiping away the worst of the fluid around his mouth with one hand. It left a sticky smear down his face, and that acrid taste was still bitter in his mouth. He slumped back and stared at the ship. It wasn't even the size of the Normandy, probably about a half, maybe two thirds of that at most, and with nothing like the sense of sleek menace the Normandy had commanded. That had been a triumph of engineering. This was too, in its own way, but if he'd had to choose a word to describe it, it would not have been 'impressive'.

_All this trouble for you, huh? You'd better be worth it._

"Here," Sidonis said, and picked an assault rifle of the same make as his own from the ground behind him. A couple of feet behind that, another identical figure - Chirin, she has a name - was crouched down behind the barrier, occasionally popping up to return some fire. Garrus took it with numb, aching fingers.

"Where'd we get this?" he said, staring down at it. He could hear his voice slurring as he spoke.

"We had a trunk, you know," Sidonis said. He'd boosted the volume of his helmet speakers to be heard over the din. Garrus would have given anything to have some kind of protection against the wall of noise assaulting his head like a tank rolling over a paia fruit. It had reached the point where he'd forgotten what not being in pain felt like. _That's probably not a good point to be at._

He hauled himself up, head spinning, and stuck his head over the edge of their makeshift cover. What lay beyond was pure, unadulterated chaos. In most gunfights, you tended to get a two-way stream of fire, maybe a more complicated one if you had room to work. This wasn't that. He'd described it to Sidonis as a crossfire hurricane, but the term didn't do it justice. The very air had a sharp electric twang to it from the massive discharge of energy; every single second, hundreds upon hundreds of bolts were flying from every direction, to every direction. A couple of the vehicles that had been parked were already airbourne, whether to escape or for a better shooting spot he couldn't tell. A few more were burning brightly; even as he watched, a heavy-looking eight-seater painted in Eclipse colours went up in a loud whumph, scattering a few mercs into the firestorm raging around them. They were cut down almost instantly, not by design but simply by the fact that there was just too much fire for it not to happen.

_We come down. Someone panics, opens fire. Someone else takes that as the signal to begin and lets rip. Two seconds later and you've got a bloodbath on your hands._

_Still, they're mercs. Technically, this is good karma._

There was a kind of perverse beauty to the whole thing. Advanced Training had had a short course on Firefight Dynamics, the sort of thing Garrus had always ignored as the bureaucrat's approach to violence. You can't use mathematics to trump instinct, not when it's your life on the line and your finger on the trigger, but it was all slotting together neatly: miniature unspoken alliances were spontaneously arising between even groups he knew to be deadly enemies for the purpose of taking out some threat to both of them only to fall apart the instant the threat went down. The whole thing would begin again, except with different players in different arrangements, and the whole thing had an intense, organic feel to it, where the gut takes over and the brain is reduced to a cooling unit. It was a dance, an insane nightclub, Afterlife on even more drugs - energy bolts lighting up the air more efficiently than any trance lasers, the hammering electric wail in the air a better soundtrack than any asari prog-dancecore outfit. _Not that I could tell the difference._

"Situation," he said, dropping back into cover. The lightstorm was absurdly beautiful for something so deadly, but his eyes were protesting painfully at the brightness.

"Situation? Well, let's take a fucking look, shall we?" said Sidonis. "We're outgunned by a factor of, oh, I don't know, two or three fucking hundred to three - and you're not exactly being useful at the moment, by the way - we're trapped here, because you're having fun playing your little 'only I can save the world' game, and I'm fucking pissed off! That's your fucking situation, Vakarian!"

A rocket screeched past them, trailing a noxious green vapour - _old salarian design, probably Eclipse or some splinter group _- and smashed into the hull of the ship, some twenty metres up. The explosion was terrifically loud, but when the smoke cleared the damage was superficial at worst. _It can take it, all right._

"We need to get inside the ship," Chirin said, squatting beside them as she popped the heat clip from her own assault rifle. "Then, we need to leave. And we need to do it fast, because this car-" she knocked on the metal with one armoured fist, producing a hollow clang, "-is not going to last much longer. When it stops lasting, so do we. Can you walk?"

"I... yeah. Probably," Garrus said. He wasn't convincing anyone, least of all himself.

"Great," Chirin said flatly. "But slow gets you killed. The real question is: can you run?"

He gingerly moved to his feet, still ducking low behind the scant cover. If anything, rather than lessening as mercs died off, the firefight somehow seemed to be becoming even more intense; the wild crackle of energy bolts was louder than ever, and the periodical explosions more and more frequent. The multicoloured hull of the ship was glittering under a sea of light, struts and protrusions and random foibles of engineering practically glowing under the fusillade.

He shifted his weight from one foot to another. The first one hurt. The second one hurt. His head hurt.

_What else is new?_

"No," he said. "I can't run. But I can stagger quickly."

"Good enough," Chirin said. "The airlock is twenty-two metres that way." She pointed with her gun at a thick square of metal sticking out from the side of the ship to their left, at about the midpoint of the hull; he could make out a round grey hatch on it. It was taking a discouraging amount of fire.

"Ah, suicide," Sidonis said brightly. "Of course. We haven't been doing enough of that in the last twenty minutes, no sir."

"You two get ahead," Chirin said, speaking over him. "Get to the hatch. Use the codes and get inside. I'll cover your backs. Got it?"

Garrus nodded, then wished he hadn't. _I could swear I just felt my brain move inside my skull. That's almost certainly really, really bad._

The maelstrom of light and that electric roar seemed to still be building steadily. Chirin's visor reflected it right back at him as she gazed at him with what could have been any emotion in the book, and he found himself wondering again what she looked like underneath it.

"Good," she said at last. "Ready?"

"No," Sidonis said.

"Go."

Garrus sprang to his feet, or at least tried to; what he got was an ungainly stagger, legs feeling like weights of lead underneath him. They didn't seem to want to bend. Or move. But his feet are coming down, cracking hard as metal met metal. Eyes focus on the hatch. Fifteen metres. Fire starting to coalesce around him; a few shots bouncing off his shield. Keeping his head low, his posture presenting as small a hitbox as possible. Sidonis beside him, rifle lighting up in a token of suppressing fire, blue bolts spinning away into the storm. More shots.

Ten metres.

He doesn't look back. He doesn't look anywhere but dead ahead, and his hand is already dancing over his omnitool, codes at the ready and then transmitting, the hatch opening, harsh white light spilling out, eight metres, seven.

Three more hard shots. Two fizz against his shield. One penetrates. Hits him hard in the leg. Doesn't get through the armour, but the force is enough, throwing him off balance - and then Sidonis is there on the other side, grabbing his shoulder as he stumbles and forcing him onwards, into the light, and then another flurry of bolts speckle their backs - shield recharged enough to take most of them - always knew this model was a good choice - but a few still hit home, none through the armour but kinetic discharge knocks them off their feet as they close in on the hatch and they half dive, half fall inside in a clanging tangle of limbs, floor white and clean beneath them even as energy bolts race overhead - and then Chirin is there, running hard, low, fast, firing blind over her shoulder, jumping over them in a flash of shadow and then he's already struggling to his feet, pain forgotten, Sidonis tangled around his legs, takes two more shots to the back as he lunges for a control panel, white set into white, stumbles, and then the hatch is closing and snaps shut with a hiss.

And then he breathes.

Sidonis hauled himself to his feet and ripped off his helmet.

"Damn, we're still alive?" he said. "Maybe the universe doesn't hate me after all. Perhaps it just really, really dislikes me."

"We're not out of this yet," Chirin said bluntly. She was leaning against a wall, breathing audibly ragged. "Get to the controls and fly us out of here. Go."

"With pleasure," Sidonis said, and vanished through a narrow, rectangular hatch set into the opposite wall. Garrus caught a glimpse of a bare, rust-brown corridor behind it before it slammed shut again, leaving him alone with Chirin.

"We should go," he said. "He'll need our help."

"Yeah," Chirin said. "Yeah. Just a minute. Need to catch my breath..."

Her armour was covered in pock marks from energy bolts now, little craters embedded into the grey metal where they'd gone through the shields. Even through the durasteel, he could see her chest rising and falling.

_She only ran as far as Sidonis, and he's OK..._

"Chirin. Are you hurt?"

She looked up at him, then down at her side. He followed her gaze and realised with a start that a long gash had developed in her armour, on the very left of her thigh. The edges of it were starting to drip blue.

He opened his mouth, but she cut him off.

"It's just a flesh wound," she said firmly. "The suit can repair the breach wait for the medigel to take effect. I'll be fine."

There was a hiss as her medigel applicator kicked in.

"OK. Let's go."

She didn't sound OK, and when she took her first step towards the door out, her leg buckled underneath her. Garrus lunged to catch her, hooking her right arm over his shoulder as he did so.

"Dammit," Chirin said faintly. "More medigel."

There was another hiss.

"Careful," Garrus warned. "Take it slow-"

"Slow gets you killed," she said, and shoved him gently away. He stepped back as she walked towards the door, only the faintest trace of a limp visible. "Come on."

_Impressive. Now that is willpower._

He shrugged, ignoring the pain in his own head, and followed her.

The interior of the airlock had been high-tech and clean. The interior of the rest of the ship looked like the outside. Long, dark corridors, floored with simple metal grates and walled by plain durasteel panels, connected in a complex network, not one built to any standard of design he recognised. If he had to pick one style of design it resembled, it would be krogan, but the krogans didn't have anything even close to this kind of tech._ At least, I really, really hope they don't._

Chirin was already disappearing down the corridor, seemingly having chosen a random direction.

"Wait up," he said. "Where's the bridge?"

"There's no visible cockpit, so I'm assuming right in the middle," she replied, without turning. "Sidonis, you there?"

"Confirmed," another voice said, spilling out of well-hidden speakers on the wall. "I'm there now. Head left, then right, then take the elevator up. Vakarian, I need the codes to get into the systems. Get your asses up here, like, right fucking now."

"Agreed," Chirin said.

It took them about a minute to reach the bridge, going somewhere between a jog and run. Every inch of the corridors had been the same: dull. Bare. Functional. Most ships at least pandered to their occupants in some way, but this was different: he felt like an uninvited guest, like he didn't belong. It was odd. It was so clearly made by biological hands, but he'd never seen any ship that felt more alien.

By the time the door slid open in front of them, Sidonis was seated in one of a ring of command seats, trying to work three seperate control panels at once. The bridge had probably been designed as round at one point or another, meant to focus around one vast, pillar-like central console with multiple control panels, but there seemed to have been some heavy-duty miscommunication somewhere: bulkheads stuck out at random from the walls, dark and hulking, so that at some points there was a solid four metres of space and at others barely enough for a humanoid to squeeze through. The lighting was brighter than on the rest of the ship, but it was a harsh, menacing light, in a way much worse than the gloom. From the ceiling there hung dozens of thick black cables, not even cased in rubber; they cast ponderous, snaking shadows across the floor and the consoles. The bridge was as chaotic and slapdash as the rest of the ship, it was to ergonomic design what your average volus was to professional basketball: it had heard of it, and might have regarded it with passing interest, but ultimately held no truck with it. _Who designed this, a krogan? They wouldn't even fit in here!_

"Upload the codes into the main unit," Sidonis called over his shoulder. "I've got nothing here."

Garrus established the connection and locked in the codes. They were devilishly complex, some kind of rotating cleartext cypher, thousands upon thousands of characters long - unbreakable, unless you were willing to spend about five lifetimes working on it. Then again, there were stories about asari academics who spent something like that working on decoding ancient Prothean tech...

"Control parameters established," a calm, cool male voice said.

"-the fuck?" Sidonis said, spinning away from the console. "Who the hell said that?"

"I did, sir," the voice said. It was smooth as honey and clearly designed to be as pleasant and soothing as possible, which only made it creepier. "I am Nine-Six-Zero-Zero-Golf, a Generation Twelve Virtual Intelligence-"

"There's no such thing as a Gen XII," Garrus interrupted.

"Not quite correct, sir; though my generation is indeed still a minimum of twenty years from the wider market, you will find that I am very much real. I represent the very cutting edge of VI technology, capable of performing calculations at approximately nineteen times the rate of the nearest rival, the Synthetic Insights Generation Eleven Military Prototype, of exhibiting behaviour that has succesfully passed even the most rigorous application of the Turing Test and of simulating more than six million inflections."

It was true to its word about the inflections. It sounded positively smug.

_A Gen XII... I'd heard about them, but I thought it was vapourware, that Syn-In had been forced to shut down the research. The word was they were so close to the sentience line that development had been tied up in red tape. People weren't willing to risk anything like that, not after... well, every single time anybody ever created an AI ever._

Then again, whoever built this thing isn't exactly the sort of person to let that get in their way.

"Great, whatever," Sidonis said. "Just don't fucking startle me like that! Give some damn warning or something, you know?"

"My apologies, sir. However, I must point out that in order to give warning, I would nevertheless have had to vocalise-"

"Shut up and give me control."

"I do not have the authority to give you access to those routines, sir. My apologies."

"Wait, do you need my approval?" Garrus said.

"Yes, sir. You are the captain of this ship. Only you have the authority to grant access to others."

_Hey, I'm a captain now. Nice._

"Grant control access to him." He shot a sidelong glance at Chirin, who had collapsed into another one of the chairs on the opposite side of the control pillar. "In fact, do so for all three of us."

"As sir wishes."

_Well, the die is cast. I'm putting a lot of trust into them. Former mercs might be former, but they're still mercs to me. I should make sure I have the ability to override._

There was a soft beep and the control panels, dark, square crystal displays spaced around the central command console, lit up in a blaze of light. Golden code began to scroll across them, too fast for Garrus to read without dealing yet more pain to his brain, and then settled into a simplistic, text-based display.

"The outer hull is taking large quantities of fire," the VI said. "It is my recommendation that something be done to either remove the ship from harm's way or to remove the ability to shoot from those attacking us."

"Wow, real fucking tactical powerhouse you are," Sidonis muttered, and began coursing through the displays. "Nine-Nine-Six-Zero-"

"Nine-Six-Zero-Zero-Golf, sir," the VI said smoothly.

"Too long, not catchy. Now on, I'm calling you Golf," Sidonis said.

"Acknowledged, sir, although the reduced epithet fails to fully encapsulate-"

"Shut. Up."

Garrus could swear he could hear Sidonis grinding his teeth. Golf was silent for a moment, before adding with what was most certainly not childish petulance: "As sir wishes."

"Good. Now, give me engines. I want to get the hell out of this system."

The VI hesistated for a second before replying.

"Engines are coming online, sir. We shall be able to depart shortly."

"How shortly is shortly?" Garrus said sceptically.

"One hundred and twenty-five seconds, sir."

"OK. Power up weapons and shields as well."

"Doing so, sir. I request clarification: does the term 'weapons' include the ADAPT System?"

"The what?"

"The ADAPT System, sir. The Advanced Delivery Atmospheric Permeation Technology System."

It delivered the information with a tone that almost sounded condescending. Garrus glared at the central pillar

"Atmospheric- ah, that." The motherload. "No, leave that out. In fact, disable it. Permanently."

"I'm afraid that is impossible, sir."

"Really? I thought the captain had authority."

"The ADAPT System can be depowered, sir, but it cannot be disabled. It is a hardware design choice. I do not have power over it. It can only be removed by physically tearing it from the ship, a highly unwise course of action due to the complex interlacing of-"

"A simple 'no' would have done," he muttered. "Who the hell built this thing?"

"I am sorry, sir, but I do not have the relevant data to properly respond."

"You don't know who built you?"

"In fact I do, sir. However, I am prevented from disclosing it to those who are not meant to know it. I lack the data that would allow me to do so, presumably by the will of my creators."

"And who are they?"

"I am unable to disclose, sir."

_Clever. Double-cleared system, untraceable without forcibly ripping out its memory banks and reading the raw data, and if whoever built this is as smart as they seem, they'll have unbreakable contingency plans in place to stop me from doing just that. Secrecy upon secrecy._

"Can you give me a location? A date? Schematics?"

"I am unable to disclose."

Garrus shivered despite the temperate air._ He didn't say 'sir'._

"We can deal with that later," Chirin said. "For now, our priority has to be leaving the system."

"True that," Sidonis said. "Golf, give us a view of what's happening outside. Are any of them still standing?"

Part of the pillar flickered and then burst into life, forming a 360 degree screen that stretched around the central console. It showed bright, high-def images from external cameras, offering multiple views of the carnage outside. The fire did seem to have lessened and the count of burning vehicles was well over half now, but the battle was still raging, streaks of light still pinging around in every direction.

"Yes, sir," Golf said. "However, they appear to be largely preoccupied with killing each other. It is likely that none of them witnessed your entrance, or, if they did, are no longer alive to talk about it."

"That's what I like to hear," Garrus said. As he did, a loud, deep hum started up somewhere beneath his feet, carrying vibrations up through his body.

"All systems online and functioning smoothly, sir," Golf said. "Warning: several unknown major energy signatures are approaching. It is my recommendation that we-"

"-get the fuck outta here," Sidonis said grimly. He reached out to the controls and pressed a few buttons. Garrus felt a heavy jerk beneath his feet before the inertial dampeners kicked in as the ship left the ground to hang ten feet or so above it. All of a sudden, the shots visible on the viewscreen all seemed to be aimed at the ship.

"Rapidly approaching projectile," the VI said suddenly. "Shields projected to withstand-"

There was a distant roar and the ship bucked, sending Garrus staggering backwards into the wall. The lights dimmed for a fraction of a second before springing back up to full power.

"Shield power estimated at eighty-two percent, sir. I suggest haste be made."

"OK, OK!" Sidonis said. "This is the first fucking time I've flown this, you know! It's hard!"

The view on the screen changed, the landing pad and the crackling energy storm whipping away beneath them to be replaced by a calmer view of the glittering Omega starline. Garrus moved in closer and sat down beside Sidonis, flicking through the options on the console until he reached one he liked the sound of.

_Weapons Systems._

"Oh, boy," Sidonis said dreamily. "This thing handles like a damn fish. This is some serious engineering-"

Another crash echoed through the ship, and it swung to the side again.

"You can drool over it later," Garrus said. "Right now, we leave."

"Agreed."

"A reminder: our shields are now at sixty-nine percent," Golf said. He was disturbingly like Chirin in how detached he was - _dammit, I'm thinking of it as a him already. It's just a VI. Never forget that._ He cast a glance across at Chirin; she was focusing intently on her own control panel, unreadable as ever.

The ship swung up and around until its blunted nose was pointed straight for the nearest gate. There were a few dozen spotted around the city, essentially giant vents to the stars; open holes, only maintaining pressure through some of the most powerful air-maintenance forcefields ever constructed. They were constantly being improved upon and given double, triple-failsafes, the greatest example of the Omega public spirit in action. _Of course, the fact that they're all dead if any of them fail might have a little something to do with the sudden attack of altruism._

"Lady and gentleman," Sidonis said, grinning, "let's hit the highway to the danger zone."

"The what-" Garrus said.

"-to the what?" Chirin said.

The ship surged up and out, blasting through the Omega night like a vertical comet. Figures scrolled across a section of Garrus's screen, telling him everything about the speed, the acceleration, the energy efficiency, the eezo purity, the engine feeds - all of it in the very upper bands of engineering._ Just as the specs said. This thing is dynamite._

_Not a patch on the Normandy, though._

"Do we have any destination in mind?" Sidonis said. "We going thrusters alone, or relay?"

"Full mass effect thrusters will not be online for a minimum of forty minutes," Golf said. "It is not a feasible option."

"Relay it is," Garrus said. "Where are we going? Citadel?"

"Are you fucking crazy?" Sidonis said. "The Council will have every monitoring post and every port anywhere even near their space looking out for this ship. The whole galaxy knows about it."

"And they'll take the tech, and maybe kill us into the bargain," Garrus said gloomily. "Citadel's out, then. Where else? Hierarchy space?"

"Same problem," Chirin said. "We have to stay outside the law for now."

"Terminus systems are the only option," Sidonis agreed. "We had a plan before we lost our first ship - we were going to Deinech. The situation's changed, but it still has to be Deinech. It's the only place big enough and divided enough to stay under the radar aside from Omega in the systems."

"Deinech's a good starting point," Chirin said. "The main colony is spread out enough for us to come in unnoticed, plus they have automated orbital docks we can use to disguise the ship's profile. If the families find out we're there, though... as Vult fugitives we would have been safe, since we took down the organisation. But as the owners of the most wanted ship in the galaxy, we'll have to watch our step."

"A risk we'll have to take. Deinech it is," Garrus said. "But anywhere but here is fine, really. After all-"

"Warning," Golf said, cutting him off. "Energy signatures approaching rapidly."

"Give me a map," Garrus said. A glowing ball of orange light appeared floating in front of him, presumably from some hidden projector, perfectly spherical, about the size of his fist. He cupped his hands around it, then drew them apart, the light following them as the sphere expanded until it was thirty centimetres wide.

In the middle was an icon of the ship, warts and all, about half a centimetre across. His vision was still very slightly fuzzy - and my head still feels like it's being used as a knifeball pitch, thank you for asking - but he could still make out the tiny details, glimmering among the starless expanse. It wasn't to scale, a miniature text display informed him: it currently represented a five hundred and fifty kilometre radius, and the scale was growing every passing second. He realised with a start that they'd already left Omega far behind without him even realising. _Traffic control is going to have a fit. Omega's the only place I know where they have execution in place of parking fines._

There were three other icons on the display, each one an ominous-looking blue dot. _Designed for turians, maybe? Odd how every race uses the colour of its own blood to represent its enemies. Then again, I'm the man in the blue armour with blue tattoos, so I can't really talk there. _They were closing, which meant that they were seriously fast. Tuned up to the max, the ship probably could have outpaced them, but the figures he was seeing hadn't been pushed anywhere near to the optimum. _People just don't appreciate the value of some serious calibrations these days._

"Sensors showing a couple of turian frigates, plus what looks like an asari sig," Chirin said. "Looks like the turian ships are together, the asari one came from the other side of the station."

"We'll hit the mass relay in... twenty-four minutes, assuming we don't lose acceleration," Sidonis said. He'd brought up his own map, though he'd kept his to the smaller size. "God, this ship is incredible! If only I were actually a pilot..."

"You're not a pilot?" Garrus said sharply.

"Well, kind of. I may have dropped out of flight school. Two weeks in."

Garrus glared at him, and Sidonis waved a hand.

"Calm down. I know the basics, so no worries."

"Oh, yeah," Garrus said. "No worries."_ I miss Joker._

"The asari ship is in firing range," Golf commented. "It is now firing."

The ship failed to move. The display in front of Garrus informed him that the ship had not exploded, which was mildly comforting in the sense that it indeed had not and mildly disturbing in the sense that the alert's tone seemed surprised.

"Did they miss?" Sidonis asked, flipping through his controls. "I'm not seeing any shield damage."

"Negative. It was a direct hit," Golf said.

"One of the turian ships is falling behind!" Chirin said. "It's lost all acceleration on my sensors!"

Realisation struck. "They weren't firing at us," he said. "They were taking out the competition!"

"Your grasp of the obvious is a fucking inspiration to our children," Sidonis said.

"The asari ship is still in firing range, sir," Golf observed. "Perhaps the time is right to do something about it?"

"Agreed," Garrus said, and called up a targeting display, sweeping the map to one side with his hand. A second hologram appeared, this one a conical display showing a different view: the narrow end, the one closer to him, represented the perspective of the rear of the ship, the icons of their pursuers replaced by miniature crosshairs. _Nice touch._

_Let's see what these shiny new toys of mine can do._

His fingers danced across the controls, and a red line appeared on his map, stretching from the ship out into deep space. His calculations let it drift slowly but surely towards the pursuing asari vessel until the two met, and the line turned blue.

_Scoped._

He gave the firing order, and the main guns of the ship, two heavy cannon pieces set deep into the misshapen hull, spat fire and death.

The fire and death missed.

_And... not dropped._

"Ah," he said. "We have a problem."

It hadn't been a narrow miss, the sort you'd expect to get with some regularity with weapons this relatively imprecise and at such large distances - this one had shot fully a couple of kilometres wide of the narrow ship. _That's not so much a margin of error as it is a bloody book!_

"Add it to the fucking list," Sidonis said. "How the hell did you miss that badly? Aren't you meant to be some kind of weapons expert?"

"Nobody's calibrated these guns in months!" Garrus said. "Golf, when was the last time this ship saw action?"

"Assuming the imprecise term 'action' is here intended to mean ship-to-ship combat," Golf said drily, "never."

"Ne- oh, boy. This is bad."

"How long do these calibrations take?" Chirin said.

"It never ends. You always have to be there, calibrating away, just to keep some semblance of accuracy going," he said. "Without that, it's like firing blind. Without any of that... what I'm trying to do is hit a bullet, with a smaller bullet, except my hands are made of bullets. It's just not possible!"

"Keep firing, I say," Sidonis said. "Never know. Might get lucky."

The ship lurched suddenly, and Garrus would have been thrown out of his seat if not for a black net of protective crash webbing suddenly flinging itself around him as the inertial dampeners wavered. The ship's lights flickered again, and the requisite shower of sparks tumbled out of one of the cables hanging from the ceiling, tumbling down over Chirin's head. They glowed bright for a second in her visor, mixing with the orange light of the ship's displays.

"Shields at thirty-one percent," Golf said. "Another such hit will destroy them entirely. I recommend endeavouring to avoid such a scenario."

"Fucking typical!" Sidonis spat. "Six million inflections, and you can't say shit in any of them!"

Garrus fired again, but without calibration it was useless: the shots flashed past the oncoming ship by three hundred metres. Slightly closer, at least.

The other turian ship seemed to have fallen behind slightly, but they weren't returning for their stricken comrades; they seemed to be staying just out of the reach of the asari weapons while keeping tabs on the situation. They could have outpaced either of them, most likely; Garrus recognised the signature as a variation on the Lonius frigate, ten years out of date and not capable of taking much punishment but still one of the fastest ships ever built - and this one was doubtless illegally modified to boot. He didn't fancy their chances against it at all.

"Sidonis, try some sort of evasive action," he said. "Anything, just try and make their shot harder."

"Won't that make your shot harder as well?"

"With guns like these, I'll probably do better."

Sidonis shrugged, and adjusted their trajectory. At least, Garrus assumed he did. With no viewscreen and no visual representation aside from his map, which was shifting to keep the ship at its centre, it was impossible to tell. Garrus shifted his guns to the general area of the pursuing icon and opened up again. The shots howled silently a hundred metres abreast of the asari vessel._ Best yet._

"They'll catch up to us inside eight minutes," Chirin informed them.

"...no, I think we'll be dead by that point," Sidonis said cheerfully. "Then they can catch up to us a lot faster. Unless our bodies end up hurtling through space at the same speed we're currently travelling after being ejected from the exploding ship, in which case it would take them at least a couple of minutes."

"Due to the relative differences in acceleration and current speed between the vessels," Golf said, "that assessment is broadly accurate."

"No, no," Sidonis said. "See, when I do it, it's the blackly hilarious 'oh-fuck-oh-fuck-we're-about-to-die-so-let's-all-be-flippant' thing. When you do it, it's just depressing and soul-crushing."

"My apologies, sir. I will endeavour to be less soul-crushing in the future."

"I look forward to it," Sidonis said.

_I wonder why everyone always resorts to sarcasm when they're in danger._

He fired again. The guns were heavy-calibre and ultra-high-powered, which inevitably meant on a ship this size that the reloading mechanism was painfully slow. That wouldn't have been bad if he'd been able to manage even a twenty percent hit ratio, well below what you'd expect to have on a well-maintained ship. But what he had was something more akin to a zero percent hit ratio, which was somehow not as good. _In essence, I'm firing one useless shot every ten seconds. This is not ideal._

The shot went seven hundred metres wide. He cursed loudly.

"I know the feeling," Sidonis said sympathetically. As he did, the ship seemed to jump ten feet sideways with an almighty crash, jerking Garrus like a rag doll against his crash netting. The lights went out again, but this time they only came back on after a few seconds, and to barely half the intensity they'd been at previously. More sparks rattled down from the wires quivering on the ceiling, and an acrid smell of smoke began to fill the room. A small siren began to wail.

"That was our shield," Chirin said coolly. "We're entirely vulnerable now."

"So, anybody got any plans for the afterlife?" Sidonis said. "I hope it turns out to be Afterlife. Eternity in a strip bar, that'd be nice. Except maybe with more drugs."

"I'm not sure if that's actually possible," Garrus said, and fired another shot. To his astonishment, the blue icon representing the asari ship flashed.

"I hit them," he said in wonderment. "I actually hit them!"

"They're not slowing," Chirin warned. "I'm not seeing any shields, though. It looks like you took them out."

"So," Sidonis said helpfully, "all you have to do is hit them again."

"Confirmation: the shot completely eliminated their shielding, and they seem to be leaking atmosphere from multiple hull breaches," Golf said. "Unfortunately, none are serious enough to stop them."

_They weren't kidding about the power of this ship, were they? One shot and I'm through asari shields! This is unbelievable. If only I could actually hit anyone, I'd be ruler of the galaxy by breakfast._

"And then there's the other ship," he said. "Assume two shots for that as well, and all I need are three absurdly lucky shots before they wipe us out."

"More or less," Sidonis said. "So, no pressure."

"Well, that's a load off my mind."

He fired again. Five hundred metres wide. At least he seemed to have slightly faster reload times than the asari did, though that wasn't particularly comforting when you considered the fact that their pursuers had an annoying tendency to actually hit them.

"Another shot, coming in," Chirin said.

"Well, fuck," Sidonis said. "I didn't want to die like this, you know?"

"How did you want to die?" Garrus said, out of curiosity.

Sidonis shrugged. "Well, I didn't really want to die at all, but if I had to choose... killed when the sheer size of my credit balance overloaded my computer and electrocuted me."

"Interesting."

"Yeah."

Sidonis looked up from his console and glanced around. The siren was still wailing in the background.

"By the way, we don't seem to be dead. Chirin, what's up with that?"

There was that brittle undercurrent in his tone again, and Garrus got the sense that he was a man skating on very thin ice.

"I'm... not sure," Chirin said. "The readings aren't clear."

"Did they fire or not?" Garrus said. He was having trouble with his own display, which seemed to be losing the position of the asari ship. He fired anyway, on the grounds that it was about as likely to score a hit as anything else from those guns.

"Yes. And they just fired again," Chirin said. "This makes no s- ah."

"Ah what?"

"They're, uh, they're duking it out with the turian ship."

Garrus blinked and stared down at his own map. The two red icons were still ill-defined, but they did seem to be closer together than before. The readout told him that it was sensing huge energy currents in the area.

_Well, you know what they say. The enemy of your enemy is also your enemy, so while they're distracting each other run like hell. At least, I think that's what they say._

"Sensors confirm that the turian vessel has entered combat with the asari vessel," Golf said. "However, neither appear to have lost any acceleration. In essence, they are pursuing us while fighting each other."

"Better than just pursuing us, I guess," Sidonis said. "Maybe we get to live after all."

"Or maybe we just get a few more minutes," Garrus said darkly. He blasted another massive round in their general direction, but the energy signatures were too close, too strong and overlapped far too much to tell where it had gone. "Chirin, you getting anything?" he called. "I can't see what's going on back there."

"Your guess is as good as - wait, it just spiked right off the charts," Chirin said, and her helmet gleamed a bright orange as she leaned in towards her console.

"The energy burst is consistent with an uncontrolled element zero detonation sequence," Golf said.

"Meaning one of them just got fucked," Sidonis said happily.

_It also means that whichever one is left is free to go after us with impunity, but don't let me spoil the party._

"Golf, can we get visual?" said Garrus.

"Negative. The range is too far to get a resolution from which any useful information can be drawn."

"Well, I'm out of ideas. I'll just keep shooting blind, shall I?"

"Can't you recalibrate the weapons from here?" Chirin said.

"In a word, no. I need manual access, and nobody else could do it. Not even Golf, unless this generation's even better than I'd heard."

"Confirmed. It requires manual alteration."

"Well, that's fucking great," Sidonis said. "Best weapons outside of the top military ships, they said. Bullshit."

"The surviving vessel has been identified as the turian vessel," Golf interjected. "It has lost all shields, but it is gaining rapidly. I project that unless action is taken, it will overhaul us in three hundred and eight seconds."

"So, five minutes," Sidonis said. "By which time, of course, we will be dead. So it's academic anyway."

"It might be that they try to disable us so they can take the tech themselves," Garrus said, and fired again. It missed. Again. "They won't want it to be used against them, motive enough to destroy it... but when did you ever know a merc who's pass up a prize like this unless they absolutely had to?"

"You know, not all mercs are like that," Chirin said. She wasn't looking at him, not so far as he could tell.

"And not enough aren't."

"The world's not all black and white."

"No. But a lot of it's pretty dark."

"Save the ethics, would you?" Sidonis said, rolling his eyes. "We've got more pressing concerns."

"It applies to you too, Lantar," Chirin said quietly.

There was a pause before Sidonis answered.

"I know that."

His voice had lost all the bravado, all the confidence. Instead, it was small, serious and quiet, almost inaudible under the siren.

Garrus tried to ignore the lack of conversation and fired again. Missed. It stole across him that the purusers weren't returning fire.

"Golf, have they lost weapons or something?"

"Unconfirmed; scans appear to indicate their weapons systems are likely to be largely functional."

"Then why are they waiting?" Sidonis said.

"Unknown."

"They're coming in to take a better shot," Garrus said, with a heavy thud of realisation. "They know we can't escape. They know our mass effect drive isn't powered up. They know we can't hit them with these guns. They know all they have to do is come in close and then take out anything we could use to escape, and then we're theirs."

"So they do want to keep the ship," Chirin said.

"Seems that way."

"So they're not likely to spare us."

"Seems that way."

"So we've lost."

"...seems that way," Garrus said miserably.

The ship crunched and quaked as a shot finally hit home, smashing through plating and armour like a hammer. The lights failed as the bridge crumpled and shook, leaving it in darkness aside from the orange glow from the screens and the occasional bursts of white from showers of sparks. Even with inertial compensators and crash webbing, Garrus' head snapped back as the shot hit, driving yet more bolts of pain into his skull. On the ceiling, three or four of the wires snapped and hung above their heads, open ends snapping and crackling with power.

Three more sirens began howling in unison.

"Damage report: one thruster has been completely detroyed. The other is inoperable. Atmospheric leaks on several decks are now being contained. Cargo bay pierced and cannot be resealed. Escape pod bay has been destroyed. Main engine has taken moderate damage and will take several hours to restore our remaining thruster to working condition. Main guns offline; initial indications are that one has been completely destroyed and the other heavily damaged. ADAPT System undamaged. Life support remains largely online, but has taken severe damage."

"Yippee-kay-fuckin'-ay," Sidonis said. "Good to know you're still with us, Golf, for all the fucking use you've been."

"We have ceased to accelerate; they are doing so as well. They appear to know we are crippled. They will be alongside us within four minutes. I recommend abandoning ship," Golf said, ignoring him with uncharacteristic sensibleness.

"With what?" Garrus said.

"There is a small two-man shuttle contained within the ship," Golf said. "It is capable of FTL for very short periods. It can be used as an escape pod if necessary."

"What's the point?" said Sidonis, leaning back in his chair. "They'll just shoot us down the second we leave the hangar."

"That outcome is highly probable."

"Do... we have any form of self-destruct?" Garrus asked.

"Affirmative. However, access to it is barred. It cannot be used. I am forbidden from allowing any course of action designed to destroy this ship."

"So that's it," Sidonis said. "Well, we tried. Got pretty far, too. Not a bad run, in the end. Sorry about this, Vakarian. Looks like we got you out of one clusterfuck and straight into a bigger one."

"Story of my life," Garrus said, trying to lighten the mood at least a little. His heart wasn't in it. Not even close.

There was a long pause. Garrus glanced around. Sidonis had his eyes closed, head tilted back and up at the ceiling; Chirin was still trying to concentrate on her console, but her body language was lethargic, apathetic.

_We've lost._

_No, Garrus,_ the voice spoke up. _You've lost. You could have deleted the codes and then this whole affair would have been over. But you had to live. You had to open the doors, and now it's game over for you and a few million others. And that's the worst thing, isn't it? You didn't do what was sensible, what was right. You did what kept you alive for a few for minutes, and you're not even going to get that. Forget doing what's wrong to get what's right, you've done what's wrong to get what's wrong. You're no better than any of them._

_You're worse._

The sirens seemed to be growing louder. Deep underneath his feet, he could feel the rumble of grinding machinery on its last legs, almost feel the heat of raging fires.

_There must be some kind of way out of here. Something to stop them, some way of destroying this ship... anything..._

_If I just had one good gun, anything that could get them... their shields are down, I just need some kind of weapon..._

Golf's words came floating back, bubbling up from pools of memory.

_"...small two-man shuttle contained within the ship... capable of FTL..."_

_The shuttle._

_That's it._

He punched a button on his console and the crash webbing around him jerked back into its slot.

_I can do this._

"Vakarian?" Chirin said, but he was already up, running for the elevator. The doors closed behind him, and his stomach floated up as he descended.

"Golf, give me directions to the shuttle," he told the air.

"Very well, sir, although any possibility of escape is unlikely-"

"I'm not planning on escaping."

"Then what course-"

The doors opened mid-sentence and Garrus was already away as Golf spoke behind him.

"-of action..."

The pain in his head had sharpened to the point of a needle, but it was good pain, bright and clear, hard and clean, like a blade of transparent aluminium running gently across his mind, and suddenly everything was wonderfully, lucidly clear.

_I haven't felt like this since Saren..._

"Take the next left, go straight at the junction and take the stairwell," Golf was droning, but he almost didn't need it; he seemed to know exactly where he needed to go, like it was all laid out in his head. All the corridors were the same rusty brown, flashing past as he sprinted through them, the pain in his legs forgotten as they pounded out a heavy rhythm on the floor until he came to a door, though how long it had taken him he couldn't say.

It slid open to reveal a large room, one done mostly in grey durasteel; more or less completely blank, its walls smooth and devoid of the sort of obvious slapdash work evident elsewhere in the ship. It was a square of perhaps twenty metres to a side; three thick grey walls and one gateway to open space, blocked only by an unbreakable air curtain. In the middle sat a shuttle, what looked like a commercial model in contrast to the DIY aesthetic of the rest of the ship, a four-metre wedge of glinting white metal.

He ran to it and pressed a button laid into the control panel by its side, standing back a little as the door swung up and out to reveal a clean, dark interior, and was about to climb in when he heard someone call his name.

"Vakarian... what are you doing?"

He glanced back, and Chirin was standing there, still helmeted, assault rifle hanging loosely from one hand. He could hear her breathing heavily.

"You know what I'm doing."

"Ramming them?"

"It's the only way. At least now, you two survive, you can destroy the ADAPT system-"

"You don't have to do this."

"I die either way. Personally, I'd rather take the way where I'm not responsible for mass murder."

"Can't you use autopilot, or, or-"

"They'd just shoot it down. It needs a manual pilot. You can't talk me out of this."

He turned around and put one foot up on the dark metal flooring of the shuttle, but a sharp tug on the carapace of his armour sent him sprawling back, completely off-balance. He lashed out automatically and connected with her chest, sending her staggering back as well. He barely managed to stay upright, but even as he did Chirin's assault rifle came around and hammered into his face. For the fourth time that hour, he blacked out.

When he came to this time, the pain was gone. Whether it had reached some threshold that took it out of the range of sensitivity or whether his mind had just decided to stop acknowledging it he couldn't tell, but it meant he could see the white shape of the door snap down as it closed behind Chirin.

He spat another mouthful of his blood onto the floor.

"Chirin! What are you doing-"

The radio link crackled a little as it established itself. "You know what I'm doing."

"You can't, it's-"

"What the fuck is going on down there?" Sidonis cut in. "Where are you? What's happening?"

"Don't do it," Garrus said, almost pleading as he struggled to his knees. The windows in the ship were totally dark, as impossible to see through as Chirin's helmet. "Let me-"

"Why? You want to die?" Chirin said.

"Die? Who's dying?" Sidonis demanded.

The engines of the shuttle started to power up, glowing a bright blue.

"Golf! Stop her!" Garrus ordered.

"Override," Chirin said.

"Acknowledged," Golf said. "Sir, I cannot stop her. She has full permission to use the shuttle."

Garrus cursed and punched the side of the shuttle, producing a hollow clang. "You can't..."

"Vakarian... Garrus," Chirin said quietly. "You're a better person than I ever was."

"That's not true-"

"You know it's true. What am I? An ex-merc? What does that change? Does that change what I've done, all the lives I've ended?"

"You don't need to do this!"

"Do what?" Sidonis said.

"No," Chirin said. "I think I do."

The shuttle left the ground and began to hover a few feet above it, rising until its base was level with Garrus' chest. The engines suddenly roared and it flashed out through the air curtain, leaving a rush of hot air that blew hard across his face, and then it was out of sight, away behind the bulk of the ship.

"What's happening?" Sidonis said, a note of panic beginning to creep into his voice. "What are you-"

"Lantar," Chirin said. "Listen to me. You need Garrus. You need him more than you ever needed me."

"What? That's-"

"You were with Vult for what, a year? I was there twenty. It's too late for me, but not for you. You can still change. I thought I could... but you're right, Garrus. A merc is a merc."

"Chirin... come back," Garrus said. "Don't do this."

"What is this?" Sidonis shouted.

"She's going to ram their ship with the shuttle," Garrus said curtly. "At that speed, with no shields, they'll both be obliterated."

"What? No! Don't do that!"

"Like he said," Chirin said. "It's the only way."

"We... we can think of something else," Sidonis said, and his voice audibly cracked. "A-anything else, just, just don't-"

"You have to stay with him, Lantar," Chirin said. Garrus heard something else in the background, the voice of a computer. He didn't hear it very well, but he could still make out the two words, words that felt like a punch in the guts.

_Collision Warning._

"You can't leave him," Chirin continued, and her voice was as composed as ever. "You're in better hands with him than you were with me. There's too much blood on mine."

"I... not you too..." Sidonis said, but his voice had lost all its fight. It was broken, small and miserable. "You... Asahi... I can't live without you..."

"You weren't going to live with me either," Chirin said, and now suddenly she sounded tired - no emotion, just a heavy sense of weariness. "Sorry. This is all I've got left."

"Chirin-" Garrus said.

"Asahi," she corrected him. "Listen... I've got a few seconds. You have to find who built that system. You have to-"

The transmission exploded into a heavy roar of noise for a split second and then cut off. All that was left was silence.

Golf broke it a few seconds later. "Sensors confirm that the turian vessel has been destroyed."

"She..." Sidonis said in disbelief. "She's..."

Garrus didn't reply. Instead, he moved out towards the air curtain and stood there, looking into the black. There was no trace of either vessel.

He wiped away another trickle of blood from his mouth. Its acrid smell filled his nostrils.

_And just like that..._

There was a small, rough sound from the comlink that made him look up for a second, then another. It took him a few seconds to realise that it was Sidonis sobbing.

_I never even saw her face._

_She died so that we could live and I never even saw her face._

Garrus Vakarian stood in a room that stank of his blood and stared at the darkness of the universe.


	6. Alpha And Omega: Epilogue

**ALPHA AND OMEGA**

**EPILOGUE**

* * *

In the end, it only took them about twenty minutes to restore enough engine power to correct the ship's course. Momentum had left them coasting along at a fair rate, enough to make it to the relay, but at such immense distances, a tenth of a degree was enough to alter your course by kilometres. _Once you lose corrective thrusters, good luck staying on course, especially when you've got a shipful of armed bastards firing lasers up your ass._

But they were heading in the right direction now, if not very quickly; it had taken an hour or so just to get to the relay from where they'd taken out their pursuers. It was enough, though. Just about enough.

"Fifteen minutes to the relay," Sidonis said. He hadn't left his chair in front of the console, sitting in the flickering dark - they still hadn't got around to reconnecting the ceiling wires or fixing the lights, that could wait - while Garrus had been getting down and dirty in the engine._ It's not like I can really object to that, is it?_

"Indeed, sir," Golf said. "It will take us a further three hours to restore sufficient functionality to the mass effect drive, however. We will not be able to reach Deinech without it."

"Fuckin' A."

Garrus leant back in his own seat. Nothing left to do now but wait. At least the worst is over, he wanted to tell himself, but he knew that was a lie. He might have crested this wave, but the trough in front of him would be as deep as ever and the following wave taller still._ Just a matter of time until I sink. I avoided it here, but how much longer can I keep it up? There were so many moments when I could have died, but I'm still here while everyone else falls around me. Alenko. Shepard._

_Chirin._

He looked up at Sidonis. They'd exchanged about a hundred words since the end of the chase, unemotional and mechanical, Sidonis directing him in engine repair from the bridge. He'd pulled himself together remarkably quickly; Garrus didn't know if that was a good sign or not.

"We can alter the ship's profile easily enough," he said, more to fill the oppressive silence that hung over the bridge like a shroud than for any real reason. "That shouldn't take long. Add in repairs, we'll be back in a couple of weeks at the outside."

"Yeah."

"And then we've got Deinech," Garrus went on, desperately trying to fill in the gaps. "We can hide there, and we can track down whoever, whoever built this after that, and... and..."

"It seems that we should not encounter undue difficulty, sir," Golf said, to his relief. "It is believed, at least according to extranet chatter, that the ship suicidally rammed its last pursuer, destroying both. We are believed dead."

"Guess they're almost right," Sidonis said dully.

"Reports indicate that the last transmissions from the vessel - a Blue Suns ship, among their most powerful - read 'Shit, they're fucking ramming-' before cutting out," Golf continued, in an absolutely neutral tone. "It would appear that the ambiguity of the wording, coupled with the failure of the ship to send out coherent sensor data, led to observers mistaking the shuttle's attack for-"

"Enough." Sidonis's voice betrayed absolutely nothing._ Takes after her._

"As you wish, sir."

They continued in silence for what felt like hours, the quiet only breached by the deep thrum of the thrusters adjusting their course every twenty seconds or so and the occasionally electric snaps from the loose cables. It probably wasn't any more than ten minutes, but he couldn't tell; he just sat there, eyes closed, listening to himself breathe.

_Hell, what do I say? I don't even know if I should say anything at all. I don't think I'm very good at this 'emotion' business. I might be a good sniper, but I'm probably a pretty horrible source of comfort._

He didn't really feel anything himself. He'd pumped himself full of medigel, probably far more than was healthy, and it was numbing both his senses and his mind. At some point, he was going to have to stop medicating and face the aches he was guaranteed to have racked up, but he preferred not to think about that. It was enough just to take the first chance he'd had in about three days to relax, not having to desperately try to prevent genocide or hunt informants or ambush mercs or be tortured or shot or repeatedly knocked out. _Hey, I could get used to this._

_But I won't. I know that. I'm not cut out for the simple life. That's not me. If you're not out on the front lines, fighting for your life, then having one loses all meaning. What value has that which nobody wants to take from you? The flipside is that some day, they'll succeed. I won't live to retire; I'll die to retire. A nice eternity of nothingness laid out before me, no wrongs to right and no rules to dodge. It sounds nice. But I've got life left in this battered body, and I intend to use as much of it as I can. At least I won't need to worry about having a mid-life crisis. Odds are that the midpoint of my life was about a decade ago._

_And I understand all this. I know my limits, I've come to terms with the fact that my lifestyle determines my deathstyle._

_But does he?_

_He's young. Maybe too young. He might not even have finished basic training before he left the Hierarchy for Vult. When you're that young, unless you've got someone - preferably armed with a big stick - to beat it out of you, you have the unshakeable feeling that you're invincible. You know you can't die, because, well, because you're you. I've been there. I think he still is there. When Shepard died, it was hard, the biggest punch to the guts since... since Mom... but I'd seen enough death to know that you just have to move on. I know he's seen death, but you become desensitised when it's just a helmet balanced on a suit of armour, a neat little target you can blast happily away at. When it's someone you know, someone who's close... poor kid. Merc or not, it's hard._

"Garrus," Sidonis said suddenly.

"Yeah?" he said, sitting up. He'd moved over a few seats since coming back from the shadowy depths of the engines so as to avoid the awkwardness of sitting directly next to Sidonis, but he was still visible around the edge of the command pillar, eyes shining bright and serious.

"I..."

_Take your time, kid. At least that's something we can afford to lose._

"I... you know, forget it. It doesn't matter."

"Doesn't it?" Garrus said mildly.

There was a brief pause, and Sidonis glanced away for a second.

"I was... I was going to apologise."

That took him by surprise.

"For what? It wasn't your fault, you have to-"

"Yeah, I know that. At least, I hope I do. But it... you know, about Shepard, in the car..."

It took him a second to remember, then the words came floating back: _'that Shepard bitch...'_

"That? You don't need to apologise for that," he said. "In fact, if anything I should be the one apologising. I was the one who punched you, after all."

"Hah. Yeah, that was a good shot," Sidonis said, with a wan half-smile. "And that's why, really. I didn't get it, why that pissed you off so much. I mean, if you'd called... called Asahi a bitch, I'd probably have agreed with you there. Fuck, she'd likely have done the same, she was realistic. But now... I feel like if you said anything like that, I'd just about be ready to tear your throat out with my bare hands."

"Not entirely encouraging, but I see your point."

"It's more than just a, a 'don't speak ill of the dead' thing. It's... I can't explain it, but-"

"-but I know how you feel," Garrus finished. "Yeah. I do. I really do."

More literally than you'd ever know, too.

"I thought so. And that's why, uh, why I wanted to apologise. I didn't know what she must have meant to you until... well, until just now."

"Apology accepted. Sorry I punched you."

"Fuck no, I totally deserved that," Sidonis said, and they both chuckled in the darkness for a second.

"But I've been thinking," he continued, after a pause. "I've been thinking about what the hell I'm going to do, for a start. Even when we had our full team, when we left Vult, we didn't really have a clear idea. We weren't thinking that far ahead, you know? It was just a sort of spontaneous 'fuck this, I'm out of here'. We only had a few days of planning. That was probably why... why I'm the only one still standing. We had our own ship waiting, Xiolan said he'd managed to get one, but we never got there. Hell, he was the only one who even knew where it was, and when he went down... we didn't have anything. We couldn't stay on Omega even if we'd wanted to, so our only plan was to get to Deinech and try to build some kind of life for ourselves."

"It's a big galaxy," Garrus said. "There's always something to do."

"Is there, though? I mean, I've burned every bridge I ever built. There's no place for me back in the Hierarchy."

"Official policy is that there's always room for re-education."

"Yeah, 'official'. Barefaced as I ever heard. You know as well as I do that I'd never be trusted with anything more than the most routine shit."

"Better than a life as a merc."

"If only because that ain't a long life."

"In this galaxy, so is everything else. Fifty years is probably the best you can expect, in the end."

"I'm only twenty."

"Yeah, you're still young. You've got a while ahead of you if you play your cards right. People like me, bitter middle-aged men that we are, we've got more to worry about."

Sidonis snickered quietly. "True. You know, she was old enough to be my mother."

"Is that right?"

"Yeah. She'd been in the business for most of her life. Did the same thing as me, dropped out of the Hierarchy at sixteen. Fucking stupid move on both our parts, but that's life."

"Why'd you drop out?" Garrus said, but he already knew the answer, better than most would.

"I don't respond well to authority. Makes me a pretty shitty turian, I guess."

"Been there."

"Yeah, I thought so. You know how it is, don't you? When there's rules and regulations on every side, all the best ways blocked off just because they can..."

"And you joined Vult."

"Vult were the best around. It was a fucking honour, or at least I thought it was. They told me it was. But look where that left me."

"Merc groups are inherently unstable," Garrus said. "They rise and fall, wipe each other out then bounce back a few years later. A PMC is basically a bunch of armed psychos working to take as much for themselves as they possibly can. In the end, that's going to come back and bite them in the ass."

"Yeah, I get that now. But I didn't then."

"Way of the galaxy."

"Pretty terrible way."

"Tell me about it."

"But that's the difference between us, isn't it? That's the difference between you and Chirin, in the end. We all thought the same way, but we went off and became a part of the system while you tried to bring it down."

"I didn't even do that, not for years. I was part of C-Sec for so long that I didn't think I'd be able to stop. I tried applying for the Spectres, but that didn't work out all that well. In the end, it was Shepard who saved me from that, Shepard who showed me a broken galaxy. But C-Sec's broken as well, they're both as flawed as each other. Only way to make a difference, I reasoned, was to do it yourself."

"You don't have to do it alone."

Garrus glanced across. Sidonis was looking back at him, expression betraying nothing.

"She said I should stay with you," Sidonis said. "She said that was the best way to go. I can't object to that, as much as I want to. She was right. You're better than us, a lot better."

"You know I'm not a hero. You told me as much yourself."

"You don't have to be a hero. Just a guy who wants to make a difference."

"It's a hard life," Garrus said truthfully. "It's painful, it's ridiculously dangerous, it doesn't even pay well."

"Vult was the same. Except for the last bit, I guess, but at least with you I'd be doing some good."

_Hah, yeah. 'Good'. That's a word you can twist into anything you want. Never trust that word. It can be used to justify anything._

"And, well... it's her dying wish, I guess," Sidonis said, with a short, brittle laugh. "I'd feel like even more of a cunt if I ignored that. I don't have any better ideas. So how about it?"

"Well, working alone didn't go so well for me," Garrus said, rubbing the hairline crack leading up his face._ That's gonna take a couple of weeks to heal. _"If it's what you want, I'm not going to stop you. But I need to know that I can trust you, and you have to trust me."

"And that's difficult, I know. I was a merc, you don't like mercs. I don't like mercs, not any more. But I think I can trust you, and I say you can trust me, though you might not want to take my word for it."

"You've saved my life at least once. That's something." _As long as I make sure he needs my approval to pilot the ship... but then again, that's not trust._

"Is it enough, though?"

Sidonis stared at him keenly. There wasn't a trace of humour in his voice or in his eyes.

_Is it enough? Damn good question. But I want to trust him. I know I can't do this alone. Do I have a choice?_

_No._

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, it's enough."

Sidonis grinned mirthlessly. "Thanks, I guess."

"Thirty seconds to the relay," Golf said, making Garrus jump slightly.

"Well, we made it," he said. "That's a start. But we've got work ahead of us."

"Repair the ship, disable the ADAPT system, find out who built it and ventilate their skull," Sidonis said. "A grand day out by all accounts. One request, though."

"What is it?"

"When we find the guy, I get to kill him. Consider it my memorial service for Asahi."

"We'll see," said Garrus, as the relay grew closer and closer on the display in front of him, crackling with that unearthly blue light. "If you're with me when we get to them."

"Oh, I'll be with you," Sidonis said. "Make no mistake, Garrus. I'll be with you 'til the day I die."


	7. Divine Intervention: Prologue

**MASS EFFECT: INTERREGNUM**

* * *

**DIVINE INTERVENTION**

**PROLOGUE**

* * *

It was dark.

He sat alone, surrounding by stacks of electronics, quietly humming away as the search ran.

Days passed. He didn't move.

Finally, after hundreds of hours, trillions of calculations, the computer's main voice hub spoke, for the first time in weeks.

"Alert: potential profile match."

The batarian swivelled his chair around to the console so quickly he almost fell out of it. Short, sharp bursts of sickly green light flickered across his face as he pored over the data, suddenly as awake as ever, eyes gleaming.

"Analyse."

"Computing."

"Project."

"Done."

What looked to be a blank grey wall exploded into life. Green filaments traced their way across it, winding around each other like serpents as they constructed an image, twelve feet long and six high. At first it was nothing more than a basic wireframe, something a kid with some piece-of-crap pirated program could have knocked up inside an hour, but it was constantly evolving, the glowing threads weaving around each other in three dimensions until the whole image detached itself from the screen and floated outwards into the centre of the room, a fiendishly complex neon construct.

"Location."

"Orbital reconstruction rings. Specific berth remains unknown."

"Run a trace."

"Running."

He'd known it would pay off. It had cost him dear, taking damn near every credit from a hundred accounts from across the galaxy, but it had paid off a hundredfold. The orbital stations above Deinech were famed for their secrecy, the product of an effort to follow Invictus and Omega into that exclusive club of five-star criminal hives; the chop-shops of the Terminus systems, they promised that they offered total anonymity to their clients as their ships were refitted and overhauled. They said that if you took a ship to Deinech, you could fly a completely different vessel out of the system without leaving your cabin and without a soul knowing.

Until today, they hadn't been lying.

The batarian unfolded himself from his chair and stood up, feeling his joints click and creak back into place. He hadn't left the chair in days, retreating into the state of near-hibernation his race had evolved, a counter to Khar'shan's vicious winters. Dark eyes glistened wetly under the emerald light as his heart, slowed to a faint limp for so long, crashed back into normal operation by running at three times its normal rate. His body burned as blood rushed around it, but pain wasn't important right now. He could ignore pain. He couldn't ignore this.

"Location is potentially any of berth eighty-nine to one hundred and six. Attempting further refinement."

He walked over to the frame of light hanging in the air as it continued to weave itself into definition. It was recognisably a ship now, though you'd be hard pressed to tell what sort.

"Final refinement: berth is between ninety-nine and one hundred and four."

"Five potential sources?"

"Correct. It is only due to your modifications that we are able to differentiate the signal to this extent."

"Spare the compliments. Give me a clear picture."

"Computing."

The hull of the ship was becoming clearer now. He recognised it as a basic model offered by the orbitals, a cheap imitation of a cheap imitation. The design was civilian, a mid-range off-the-shelf piece carefully shaped to look as non-threatening and unimportant as possible. It was about the right size...

"Exterior appearance complete."

The ship jumped into sharp focus as the green lines went into overdrive, spinning themselves around the frame in a crude approximation of texture.

"The design is a basic model, offered at a price of one hundred thou-"

"Shut up. Demonstrate interior profile."

"Only a basic profile can be established-"

"Show it."

The green lines began to fade until their glow was gone entirely, leaving nothing but their wiry shapes hanging in the air. Different lines began to fade in, inside the green, visible through the translucent plating. These ones were done in a harsh white, at first tracing nothing more than a vague shape underneath the exterior hull. Nothing well-defined enough to get a good look, not yet.

"ETC."

"Estimated time to completion: one minute twelve seconds."

"Run Mu-core process nine-five-K. No arguments. Do it."

The lines froze for a second mid-writhe, then started up again at double pace. Every other item of electronics in the room cut out, even his own omnitool.

"Show points of comparison with reference L-W-six-six-three."

A dozen red sparks leapt into existence, dotted along the white lines. A new one appeared as the form took shape, and then another and another until several more were appearing every second.

The white lines still hadn't forged a coherent shape, but there was a reason for that. As they twisted around each other and hummed through the air like miniature energy bolts, they were shaping something which didn't seem to have any real shape; no streamlining, utterly unaerodynamic, with struts and metallic extrusions jutting out seemingly at random.

As he watched, the red spots were multiplying exponentially. Inside a couple more seconds, there was more red than white.

"Match likelihood: ninety nine point eight seven percent."

"Remove external hull and similarity comparison."

The green and red died away, leaving only the sharp glow of the white. The ship was shapeless and ugly, but that didn't matter to him. All that mattered was the ship itself.

He raised an arm, let one hand glide along the intangible hull. _Deus, you're no god if you can't even hide my ship from me. As to whether you can keep it..._

_We'll see._

"Revised match likelihood: ninety nine point nine nine one percent."

"Computer," he said, still staring at the white hologram in front of him, "call Melenis and Erash. Inform that I have work for them." He paused for a second, and frowned, before adding: "Oh, and they might think I'm dead. Make sure to tell them that I'm not."

"Running."

"In addition, tell them... tell them... hmm."

The batarian's lips pulled back to reveal a row of yellowing teeth, glinting in the light.

"Tell them I've hit the jackpot."


	8. Divine Intervention: Deinech

**DIVINE INTERVENTION **

**ONE: DEINECH**

* * *

"I hate you."

"Four," Garrus said absently.

Sidonis glared at him suspiciously. "What?"

"Four. The number of times you've told me that you hate me."

"If you don't pay me back, I may have to brutally murder you," Sidonis said.

"How would that help?"

"I'm sure I could find someone to pay me to do it."

"I'm flattered."

"You realise that I'm down to a hundred and four thousand?"

"Could be worse. Where did you get all that, anyway?"

"It was," Sidonis said acidly, "the collective bank balance we set up when we were leaving Vult."

"So," Garrus said, "how much of it was yours in the first place?"

Sidonis mumbled something.

"What was that?"

"Seventy thousand, OK?"

"So your complaint is essentially that you've made a profit and blame me for it not being bigger."

"I hate you."

"Five. Money isn't everything, you know."

"Maybe, but it's a lot of things. Things like guns, beds, food, first aid, alcohol, drugs, asari dancing girls. You know, the bare essentials."

"As essential as those may be, they don't matter if you're dead. If we hadn't refitted, we'd have been rotting meat inside the week," Garrus said. He stroked his chin thoughtfully. "Unless we were killed in a way that would prevent rotting, which isn't inconceivable."

"You're fucking morbid, you know that?"

"Yep."

"Well..." Sidonis said, and paused. He seemed to think about it for a few seconds before jabbing a finger at Garrus and continuing. "...good!"

_Hell, I'd hate to think what would have happened if I'd managed to get here by myself. I barely had enough to cover a third of the repairs and refits, and I really, really don't want to know what they do to people who can't pay for their repairs on this planet. I don't even know this planet, but it's in the Terminus Systems. I'll just assume it's creatively violent._

"I'm not going to let you forget, Vakarian! One million, three hundred and eighteen thousand credits!"

"Shut up and get landing permission," Garrus said, waving a hand. "Wouldn't want this nice ship we just repaired to get blasted out of the sky, would we?"

"I. Hate. You."

"Six."

As Sidonis grumbled his way through negotiating a berth, Garrus leaned back in his chair and glanced around the overhauled bridge. The repairs had taken about two weeks in the end, two painfully long weeks spent watching old vids and trying to single-handedly wrestle the ship's systems into some semblance of functionality as the mechs hammered away at the hull. The bridge had been upgraded, with the more ridiculous protrusions cut away and the walls replated, giving the place a much more open, airy feel. The harsh white lights had been softened and the cables tucked away into the ceiling, but it had been unfeasible to change the strangely designed central pillar. Most of the rest of the ship was still as spartan and ramshackle as ever, though they'd at least managed to return everything to working order.

The hull was so unusually constructed that they'd ended up just building a second hull over it, one that kept inside their shield bubble and, although it impacted their speed and acceleration by about twenty percent apiece, also afforded them an extra layer of protection. Anyone looking at the ship from the outside would see a beaten, worthless old civvie vessel, the sort of rustbucket that would cost more to take over in spent thermal clips than it was actually worth. _In short, the perfect disguise. As long as nobody bothers to turn a high-powered scanner on it._

_Fingers crossed, then._

He'd had a while to inspect the ADAPT system as well. Golf hadn't been kidding. The delivery system was engineered with breathtaking precision into the most vital systems, ensuring that any attempt to remove it would be extremely dangerous, extremely difficult, highly likely to shut down all life support and, if his cautious calculations had been correct, detonate the drive core. _We may not know who built it or why, but one thing's for sure: whoever designed this is a genius, and a genius who doesn't want this system to be disabled. That means either a mad genius or an evil genius. Quite possibly both. That's usually the worst kind. Why can't I ever run into any reasonable, amiable geniuses? Even Tali threatened to kill me a few times._

"ICV Hortensius, you are clear to land," a turian voice said. "Approach the spaceport from a minimum in-atmosphere distance of one thousand kilometres. Your touchdown pad is B-127."

"Roger that, Control. Over and out," said Sidonis, and killed the transmission. He glanced shiftily at Garrus, then quickly looked away, but the damage was done.

Garrus raised an eyebrow. "Hortensius?"

"I had to make up a name, all right?" Sidonis said, looking uncomfortable. "It was the first thing that came to mind."

"Why that, though?"

"It's, uh, it's my middle name."

"Really?"

"No jokes. Please."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

The ship - correction, the Hortensius - was shaking slightly as they hit atmo. He'd set the screens to give an external display, but for now all they could show was the eternal layer of blue-grey cloud that covered Deinech like a sheet. The only places it ever lifted were at the poles, or so they said. _A shame. I haven't actually seen real sky since Ilos. Then again, considering what Ilos was like, maybe that's for the best._

"So," Sidonis said, not looking away from his console as the ship descended, "what's our plan of action?"

"You do realise I've never even been to Deinech before?"

"Well, I have. I lived there a couple of years before I went to Omega, actually. Man, I don't even remember why I left. Money, probably. It's always money. Still is. One million, three hundred and eighteen thousand. Remember."

"You have any contacts we can use?" Garrus said, ignoring the latter part. "Any old friends who can give us some leads?" Not a likely angle, really. We've got no way in hell of knowing where this ship came from right now. Still, we have to try.

Sidonis chuckled throatily. "You're really still a Citadel guy, aren't you? That sort of thing might work on the Citadel, even in the Wards. You can build up trust, that sort of thing. Here, what people trust are the number of zeroes in your credit balance. Nothing else. The families run a tight ship; all the best info-dealers are with them or underground."

"You were a merc, though. Isn't the underground your business?"

"There's a whole lot of undergrounds, man. I was barely below the surface. You dig down, it's the same as going the other way; you find the best people, the best gear, the best info. I was right between the two, not even two-bit. The families run Deinech, the syndicates shape it, and unless you're tight with one of them you're shit out of luck."

"And I assume we're not tight with one of them?"

"No we are not," Sidonis said. "I have contacts, but I don't know if they're even still alive. If they are, odds are they've moved on, hit a level too high - or too low - for people like us to see. Street level, you've got a few brokers working the feed markets, same as on any shithole in the Systems, but here they're forced in or forced out. You either get promoted, or you get fucked. Hell, you'll probably get the latter any way you turn."

"Who are these families you keep talking about?"

"Seriously? Dude, we were stuck here for two weeks! You could have read half the fuckin' extranet!"

"I saw some of it. Not much. In fact, I'd rather hear it from you, someone who's actually lived there."

"You want me to explain the entire political situation of a planet of a quarter-billion people."

"Yes."

"What the fuck, we've got time," Sidonis grunted. "All right. Deinech is technically an absolute monarchy. Problem is, there hasn't been a monarch in about, oh, four centuries."

"What happened?"

"Violence. I don't really know, but apparently they thought continuing the system wouldn't work. So what we have instead is the nobility - the families. Proper nobles, with all titles, you know? And that's all hereditary, and that means we get our little dynasties. Big families, hundreds or thousands strong, that control most of the wealth - that is, most of the legal wealth - and pretty much the whole planet."

He flicked the ship onto autopilot and turned to face Garrus. His chair squeaked as it swivelled, still new out of the box.

"Now, they're mostly racially divided. Mostly. There's a few major exceptions, usually involving asari; the Nivido family are a sort of asari-krogan coalition. For some reason, they've been able to make it work. There's others - there's an asari-human-salarian group, though they've lost a lot of power in the last few decades since the humans started marrying in, and salarian breeding habits don't help much. Until about two months before I left there was the Vassius asari-turian family - actually, they were the last turian family of any real power - but they lost out to the Gashk family over a bidding war. A literal bidding war. Aside from that, there's about eight or nine big players and thirty-odd smaller families that still matter. And what you get is a web of alliances and agreements that you can study for a lifetime and it'll still fuck your mind, especially with all the quasi-noble families around the edges. Now, these people who control Deinech don't want to share it. Only natural. That means we get a nice little stitch-up; the only way to get any power in this place is to be born with it, and the minor families spend all their time desperately trying to drive up their social stock. It's insular in the extreme, and it's harder to break into than the Illium music business."

"And then you've got the other end of the spectrum," said Garrus.

"Right. Those are the people with legislative power; there's a Grand Senate, which is so fucking grand that they went and put in the damn name, but that's really just a formality for whoever's scraped together the strongest group of families. They'll use it against each other and for nothing more, because these coalitions are volatile like a krogan nightclub. That means that there's no reform, because we're living in the fucking capitalist utopia of the day. Nothing's changed since the last monarch had their head blown off; the players duck in and out and occasionally get turned into mincemeat, but the dance goes on."

"...I don't think that metaphor makes any sense," Garrus said cautiously.

"So," Sidonis said, ignoring him completely, "that leaves a nice big gap for a criminal element. And when I say element, I mean a whole lot of elements. Like, transition metals number of elements, each with their own little protons and neutrons and electrons and all that shit."

"...neither does that one."

"Listen, do you want to fucking hear this or not?"

"I'll be good."

"Like fuck. So, that means your standard gangs, mercs, syndicates, crime bosses, all that jazz - except here, they take a leaf from the nobles' book and go right into the whole 'web of intrigue' crap. Omega's violent, but it's a sort of chaotic violence, nobody really knows what's going on. Not even Aria, I guess. But here, all the violence is carefully directed between very discrete - but not discreet - factions, like the difference between a bodyball game and a bodyball riot. There's a middle ground between the families and the underworld, but it's a narrow one by any standards. Both sides are looking to snap up any talent that crops up before someone can use it against them. The ultimate job market. That means that unless you're part of some group of at least moderate importance, you've got no access, period. The best dealers are behind closed doors, so all you can do is try to scratch out a living in the middle ground until you get noticed. Whether getting noticed is getting a promotion or a hole in the head - or a head in the hole, if you believe some of the stories - well, that's never certain. I was lucky. I got picked up by Vult before anything too bad could happen to me. Then again, maybe that's bad itself. Didn't turn out well for most of them, did it?"

He gave a short, rough laugh and turned back to his console.

"That's about the size of it, anyway. Unless you're planning to make a home here, I suggest this remain a short stop while we figure out what the fuck we're going to do with our lives. And attempting to bring political change is not a valid goal, before you suggest it."

"I wasn't going to," Garrus said, watching the thick cloud whip past the camera. "I don't really have any solid ideas. I want to make a difference, but if this is how you call it, two people will get squashed like bugs."

"True."

"So we get more people."

"Um. What?"

"It worked for Shepard. Who's to say we can't do the same? Power in numbers, right?"

"Yeah," Sidonis said uneasily. "I'm... you know, forget it. It's your call. I agreed to this, I have no right to complain."

"Listen," Garrus said, "don't think you have any obligation to do this. You could leave, any time you want."

"You believe in spirits?"

The apparent non sequitur caught him off-guard. "I... what?"

"Spirits. People, places, ideas, all sorts. Do you?"

"Well, I... it's not really a..."

_Hell, what do I believe? Damn good question. I should probably sort that out at some point._

"I can feel her," Sidonis said. "When I close my eyes, I can see her. Looking at me. Judging." He turned to Garrus again, and his eyes glinted dully in their sockets, shorn of all emotion, just like his voice. "She told me to do this. I can't turn that away. I can't. Not with her. Not now."

A chill ran up Garrus' spine despite the warmth of the ship. _And he calls me morbid._

"That's the way it has to be," Sidonis continued. "That's the only way it can be."

"If you say so," Garrus said, forcing some joviality into his voice. He definitely didn't feel any.

Sidonis inhaled deeply. "Sorry. I don't mean to get all pious on you."

"Don't worry about it."

"Thank you."

And just like that, the mood drained away like water from a bathtub.

There was an awkward silence of thirty seconds or so, save for the constant deep hum of the engines.

_Maybe I should take him to a psychologist. That definitely didn't sound healthy._

"We are approaching Valac," Golf said suddenly.

"Valac?" Garrus said.

"The capital," said Sidonis. "The only city, really. Most of the population's in smaller towns and minor cities, but the real game is in Valac."

Garrus' brow furrowed. "Why would there be only one major city on a planet of this size?"

"You'll see soon enough."

As Sidonis said it, they finally streaked out from the heavy cloud cover, and Garrus saw. The surface of Deinech was water, more or less; one vast, planet-wide ocean. The clouds weren't just clouds, they were a permanent band of rain hanging in the sky, constantly showering the planet. As the Hortensius cut through the downpour, droplets ran across the camera lens; beneath them, there was nothing but a dark, placid blue-green field.

"Incredible," Garrus breathed. "An ocean planet? I've always wanted to see one of these."

"It's not like there's any water shortage here. It's always raining on Deinech," Sidonis said. "Apart from the poles. It just snows there. But everywhere else on the planet, it's constantly monsoon season. Something to do with the water cycle and evaporation, I think, but I haven't got a clue. Means that there's barely any land, which means everything is built on tiny islands. Valac is on the biggest, and even that isn't huge. A lot of it's taken up by food-synthesis stations anyway. There's fish in the sea, but not much else to eat."

"Why did they colonise this place anyway?"

Sidonis shrugged. "You can breathe the air. That's something. Perhaps it wasn't this bad a thousand years ago? Fuck, I don't know. Look at a history textbook some time. I was here for the crime, not the landscape. Seascape. Whatever."

Some sort of shape was appearing on the horizon. "hat Garrus initially thought was some kind of optical illusion turned out to be a tiny island, probably not much bigger than ten or fifteen square kilometres. It was covered with buildings - no, a single building, one vast construction jutting hundreds of metres up into the air, a solid grey block designed to take advantage of as much space as it could muster. It expanded outwards as it did upwards, a sort of reverse pyramid shape, until it reached some apparent limit at maybe forty kilometres across and began to return to a peak, making it look as though someone had planted an impossibly vast grey diamond in the middle of the ocean. As he watched, a ship detached itself from a mooring halfway up the side and jetted off into the atmosphere, looking like a toy against the sheer size of it.

"Hin," Sidonis said, following his gaze. "Population: five million registered, almost certainly more in reality. Third-biggest settlement on the planet, the main power base of the salarian families."

"In that much space? That makes Illium look roomy!"

"Price of living here. Valac isn't anywhere near as bad, actually, all things considered. There's something like fifty, fifty-five million there, but it's spread over a much bigger area, the biggest island on the planet. Old rules about construction come into play in certain areas; the families don't like it, but if anyone tried to repeal it their enemies would have the motion shut down in seconds in case they tried to turn it to their advantage. The city development there's still crowded, but more or less normal thanks to that."

"Ah," Garrus said gloomily. "Politics."

"If you don't like politics, you're in the wrong fucking place, my friend," Sidonis said, as the durasteel montstrosity that was Hin disappeared over the horizon. They must have gigantic mass effect fields in there somewhere. There's no way that could be built without them. Incredible.

The next few minutes passed in silence. They passed nothing else but open sea on their way to Valac, and still that rain was lashing down no matter how far they flew. It took them about twenty minutes to reach the city, though they could have breezed through it in three if they'd been at full power. Appearances were important, though. It wouldn't do for anyone to see an old civvie steamer like this pull gees like a top-of-the-line frigate could.

Valac, when they reached it, was less impressive. At first it was just a grey blur on the horizon, but it quickly resolved itself into a skyline. It looked more or less like a normal city, though the skyscrapers were probably a little taller than average and packed more densely in the city centre. Two towers, one looking about seven hundred metres and another about a thousand, jutted up close to each other, poking out of the skyline; most of the rest were all about four or five hundred, the design aesthetic typically hard-edged and square. Pure practicality, nothing like the elegant spires of Illium or the chaotic sprawl of Invicta.

The suburbs, if you could call them that, tended to reach no higher than about fifty metres, apartment blocks standing out among them at three or four times that height. The island it was based on was far larger than the first one, this one looking like several hundred square kilometres, maybe in the thousands, a shapeless, industrialiased mass; as they approached, he could make out dozens of thin lanes of aircar traffic crisscrossing between the buildings through the constant veil of rain. There was a sense of buzzing life to it, the sort you got in all the major cities. _And that means crime. The Wards have it, Omega has it, Nos Astra has it. Whenever you've got a few million people living this close together, there will be blood._

Sidonis brought the Hortensius down in both speed and altitude as they came to the city, until they were barely a hundred metres above the rippling sea. There were dozens upon dozens of ports and jetties sticking out into the ocean, hundreds and thousands of ships from dilapidated motorboats to enormous pleasure yachts drawn up alongside the city._ Can't be that much pleasure in a climate like this. I feel slightly depressed just from being here._

The spaceport was of an unusual design; it was by far the tallest structure on the island, so tall that he'd previously assumed it to be a discoloured patch of cloud through the rain. It must have stretched upwards to a kilometre or over. It was built over a vast area in a strange lattice design, one he couldn't understand until he realised that it was essentially a gigantic, mind-bogglingly huge multistorey car park. The metal struts, doubtless mass effect-boosted to hold up the enormous weight, formed a huge set of racks in which hundreds upon hundreds of starships were nested, neatly tucked into cubicles hundreds of metres long. The sheer amount of power that must be necessary, as well as the quantity of eezo... impressive.

They passed a few ships detaching from the network, moving with all the ponderous slowness required to avoid smashing themselves to pieces in the labyrinthine setup. A few more were docking, their speeds even lower. _Security here must be tighter than a justicar's... mental discipline. It would be so easy to destroy it all in one attack. And it's probably bad that I'm sizing up every structure I see for weakness to terrorist threats._

After a couple of minutes winding around the spaceport, Sidonis slowed the ship to a crawl at a seemingly arbitrary position and teased it into a docking cradle, one with barely twenty or thirty spare metres above them and not much more to the sides. The ship's rough exterior had added about that to the ship's profile, but even without it it would have been a tight squeeze. Above them was a simple flat grey roof, supported by dozens upon dozens of high-strength corine wires and crossbeams, as well as some ominous-looking wires glowing a bright blue. _Some kind of mass effect field, I'd bet. Ships weigh thousands of tonnes, even if the gravitational field is low. They'd need some heavy-duty construction work to support that. This whole planet is unbelievable._

The ship touched down with an audible, heavy clang, and Sidonis killed the engines. Their deep hum lessened and faded before dying away completely, leaving the ship in an eerie near-silence.

Golf chose to break it with characteristic appropriacy.

"We have arrived."

"That doesn't even merit sarcasm," Sidonis said wearily, and got up. "Come on, then. We'd better see what we can find out."

"Hell, anything to have some time off this ship," said Garrus. "Any idea where to start?"

"I'll check out my old contacts, but I'm not optimistic. Odds are they've all been absorbed or fucked over so hard they don't have any organs left. Either way, we're not gonna have an easy time getting to them."

"And we're not exactly rich." He felt his joints click satisfyingly as he rose from the seat, and unhooked the assault rifle he'd been given from the back of the chair to sling it over his shoulder. The weight was comforting._ And that speaks a lot about me, I guess. A galaxy where an implement designed purely to unload high-powered death is your safety blanket. Sometimes, you just have to laugh._

Sidonis grimaced. "Don't remind me. Actually, do remind me. Because you owe me one million-"

"-three hundred thousand, et cetera, et cetera," Garrus said wearily. "Drop it for now, would you?"

"No!"

"Sir, we are receiving a request for payment," Golf said suddenly.

"Payment? For what?" Garrus asked.

"Oh, man," Sidonis said miserably. "I've got a bad feeling about this shit, you know?"

"Docking fees, sir."

"Ah, right. Place like this, it must be pretty steep. What, four, five thousand?"

"Eighty-five thousand credits, sir."

"Ah," Garrus said thoughtfully. "That's... that is somewhat more than five thousand."

"Yes, sir."

"Why so high?"

"The most probable reason is due to the amount of energy necessary to maintain this construction's integrity, sir. To keep a vessel of this magnitude sustained for many days would cost thousands of credits."

"Well, can't fault them on consistency," Garrus said. "Fleecing you every now and again, nobody likes that. At least there's a comforting regularity in how this place rips you off."

There was a short silence. He turned to look at Sidonis, who was trying very hard to look as though he wasn't there and, if he was, was absolutely not involved in whatever you're talking about, officer, and probably wasn't even in town at the time.

Sidonis cracked first. "No. OK? No!"

"Look, I don't have any money! None! I sank all of it into those repairs!"

"Yeah, barely a hundred grand! I spent a fucking million on this-" he slapped a hand into the wall, producing a hollow clang -"and I'm not pissing away any more! Got it?"

"So what do you suggest we do? Leave?"

"Yes! If we stay here, we'll be indentured servants by tomorrow! We can't fucking afford it!"

"And go where? Invicta? Have you ever been to Invicta?"

"...no, but-"

"Or Omega? That's a risk we can't take. We saw those ex-Vult mercs come for you."

"OK, not Omega, but-"

"But where? We have absolutely no leads on this. But somebody out there is a technological genius with a penchant for building weapons that could kill billions, and this is the best place to start looking. It might not be cheap, but you know your way around here. There's a lot riding on this. Lives are worth our money."

"How do we even know they'll make more?" Sidonis griped. "This is a prototype! And they have to be dead anyway, because the codes had to have come from somewhere."

"Speculation. How do you know they weren't stolen? What makes you so sure they were taken from the designers themselves?"

"We don't know anything about this, this ADEPT thing, though! We don't even know if it works!"

"The ADAPT system is fully functional and cannot be disabled, sir," Golf interjected. "My programming forbids me from revealing its creator or location of construction-"

"Creator," Garrus said. "Creator singular? Just one?"

"That data is classified."

"Ah. Of course."

"However, sir, I am able to provide a basic overview of the method utilised, a simplification of the version transmitted on Omega, if it is required."

_Ah, simplification. Where would I be without you?_ "What is it?"

"The ADAPT system utilises femtotechnology combined with a novel remotely mutable biological agent. The distribution method takes advantage of the Dyot-Latatios-Schickelgruber constant to spread the femtobots across any planet of approximate standard size within two hours. The biological agent itself can be manipulated to affect only certain DNA structures - or all organic life."

_Why is it that I feel deeply uncomfortable whenever a computer mentions 'all organic life'?_

"What, even, like, quarians and volus?" Sidonis said.

"Yes, sir. The ADAPT system was specifically designed to such a scale that there currently exists no technology capable of countering it. The femtobots are capable of penetrating environmental suits, walls and anything short of extremely powerful biotic barriers and mass effect fields."

"Hell. What kind of sick bastard would design something like this?" Garrus said.

"You want a list or something?" said Sidonis. "Because, you know, I can think of about a thousand off the top of my head. And those are just the ones I know personally."

"And we wonder why AIs are always trying to kill us all."

Sidonis scratched idly at his chin. "Well, maybe you do."

"But this information is interesting," Garrus continued. "If we know some of the design foibles, that gives us at least an angle to follow."

"What, we go around asking 'hey, what do you know about genocidal femtotech'?" Sidonis said sarcastically.

"Pretty much. Have any better ideas?"

"I'm not really an ideas man."

Garrus went over to the elevator down from the bridge, and the door slid open.

"Come on, then," he said. "I think there's someone who wants you to pay them large amounts of money."

"I hate you."

"Seven."


	9. Divine Intervention: Lines

**DIVINE INTERVENTION**

**TWO: LINES**

* * *

"You see it?" the salarian asked. The spaceport was well over a kilometre away from their perch atop the skyscraper, its vast shape nothing more than a faint shadow through the veil of rain. He couldn't make anything out from here, but then again, his companion had more than just eyes.

The masked figure standing past him, right on the edge of the building, turned back to him. Rivulets of rainwater ran down his mask, briefly glinting orange as they dripped past the glow of the eyes. They betrayed absolutely nothing, as usual.

"Yes. I see it."

"Good."

He stepped out from the overhang into the rain, twitching the leather hood affixed to the back of his armour over his head.

"Berth?"

"B-120 range. Likely 126 or 127. Impossible to get sufficient resolution to be certain, but it is definitely the target."

The salarian grinned. "What, your fancy electronics not good enough?"

"No. Not yet. Perhaps Sensat will agree to improve them should we acquire the target in payment."

"What about the money?"

"Sensat's expertise is more valuable than a handful of credits."

"Now there's something I never thought I'd hear a volus say."

"All life seeks value. It is merely found in different ways."

"Volus philosophy?"

"No. Just philosophy."

"Yeah? I'll stick to explosives, thank you. Better payoff."

"More immediate payoff. Quality is subjective."

The salarian sighed. "You know, talking to you is a real chore. Anyone ever tell you that?"

"To do so would require talking to me."

"That's what I mean!"

"You have no obligation to talk to me, nor do I to you."

"OK, that's just insulting."

"My apologies."

They stood there a moment longer, watching the rain fall on the city as it had done for centuries before, draining away into a million rooftop tanks and power converters, before the salarian turned away and went back to the aircar parked behind them.

"We're done here," he said. "You are sure it's the ship, right?"

"Definitively. Sensat tracked it to Valac from the orbital dock, and this is the only match that arrived in the timeframe we have confirmed."

"Can't believe Sensat hacked those docks. I thought it was meant to be impossible."

"Not impossible. Merely difficult. Sensat excels at the difficult," the volus said, following. "Returning from the dead is not beyond him, it seems. Many would say the same of his technology, yet he found a way. Why should this be any different?"

"True enough. Well, he'll have his ship back once we get the codes," the salarian said, as the car's body hissed up and open. "Deus won't know what hit him. Well, that's not quite true. He'll probably know what hit him. Especially if it's you."

"Overconfidence should be avoided. We cannot predict these events accurately. Why, for example, would Deus bring the ship back to Deinech, even thinking Sensat to be dead? It does not fit with his style of operation."

"Fuck, does it really matter? We've got work. Isn't that enough?"

"No."

The salarian snorted with laughter. "Never is, is it? Get in the car. We need to find Deus and get those codes back, and standing around here talking about it won't get it done."

"On that we are agreed."

* * *

The taxi ride into the district Sidonis called the Lines took about five minutes from the spaceport. Garrus spent it staring out of the window, mesmerised by the elegant, shifting patterns in the rain, but he had a sneaking suspicion that Sidonis was shooting dirty glances at him all the while. He did his best to ignore it.

The Lines was so named for the two main roads running through it, straight as an arrow and side by side, each one supporting six lanes of congested ground traffic. The taxi was at least an aircar, so they saw it all from above, long tails of vehicles creeping along while hordes of pedestrians dodged between them to cross the roads. There were stores set into the buildings, some of them part of some brand he recognised, but there were far more than the standard clutch of personally-owned places you'd expect. Omega had a similar thing going, but that was Omega; this was a major, modern and seemingly relatively civilised city, the kind of place where you'd expect even the air to be branded.

_Maybe it's to do with the district? _Sidonis had told him about the Lines in general terms, explained that it was the best place in Valac to get set up if you were new - and that meant that it was transient, individualistic. It was a hunting ground, in essence; the families and gangs both were watching like hawks for any edge, and he could see how the constant turnover of talent would give both opportunity and incentive to carve out a personal niche.

_God, this place is unreal. Did they design it like this, or did it just naturally evolve as a farm for the skilled? It's bloody feudal!_

The aircar was descending into the streets at a furious pace, but Garrus had been in far too many taxis in his time to be worried. Cabbies always seemed to be slightly psychic, sending their cars through gaps that logically shouldn't exist at speeds that logically shouldn't be attainable, and the purple-skinned asari behind the controls of this one didn't seem fazed as the cab dropped down over a flat rooftop with half a metre to spare and dived through a four-metre gap between two aircars in a skylane._ I've had enough of aircars for a few months, though. In fact, I should learn to stay away from vehicles in general. I still have bruises from that Mako debacle._

The cab touched down and Sidonis sullenly wired over the payment. It couldn't have been all that much, but Garrus suspected that he wasn't exactly a natural big spender. He looked to be almost in physical pain whenever he handed over money.

_Come to think of it, I have no money. At all. _

_This could become problematic._

Somehow, he didn't think asking Sidonis for some would go over well.

When the cab had flashed away into the sky again, they went under an overhang on the corner of a building to escape from the rain, which was coming down heavier than ever. Visibility was limited to a hundred metres or less, everything past that dissolving into a grey blur, but the streets were still packed. Most of the people thronging the road and weaving between the near-immobile cars had thick hoods drawn up over their heads, and Garrus found himself wishing he had one. _Still, at least I don't have hair. I have no idea how humans can deal with that._

His armour was sealed at the neck, so at least the rain couldn't get past his head. Even so, it was cold and strange, the first time he'd felt it since... well, it had been a couple of decades. Palaven didn't have much of the stuff, and it had been damn rare where he'd grown up - but since then his life had been spent mostly in artificial constructs, with most of his time planetside being dry or spent in a sealed suit. _Odd how divorced from nature you get._

"Right," Sidonis said, leaning against the wall next to him. "Basic extranet check of the area turned up a few matches. I had about ten contacts I wanted to see. Four are dead. Four are hired. That leaves us two."

"And we definitely can't see the hired ones?"

"Well, you can if you really want to. But someone important is going to know, and they're going to want to know why, and then comes the kidnapping and torture and interrogation and death. That happens a lot here."

"I'm sure I'll fit right in," Garrus muttered.

"So we have these two," said Sidonis. He didn't sound happy, and Garrus said so.

Sidonis snorted. "Well, think about it. I've been gone from here... hell, I can't even remember how long. Years. I was low-level, which means the handful of contacts I made were bottom-feeders like me. Four of them getting noticed is a fucking miracle. Four of them dying isn't enough. But that leaves just two, and those two were the ones who've attracted so little attention that nobody's hired or killed them."

"It might mean they're just good at staying under the radar," Garrus said, without much hope.

"Yeah. It might. I might be Councillor fucking Velarn. This might not result in us getting killed. Whole lot of mights. Fact of the matter is that these guys are so shit at what they do that they're still doing it. It's like a careful balance of incompetence. Not good enough to be cared about, not bad enough to fail. Just... mediocre. And they're all we've got, because indie feeders are a clique-y bunch of pricks. They'll only talk to people who have connections themselves unless you pay them a whole lot of money. Money which, inci-fuckin'-dentally, we don't have any more."

"And these two won't want so much?"

"No. I'm in the net, I think. They'll listen. They might even know something. But info is valuable here. It'll cost us. Well, me."

"Anything else?"

"No. That's all we have. Great, isn't it?"

"How can this place survive?" Garrus mused. "It's insular in the extreme, everything's ridiculously expensive..."

"This isn't a city for persons," Sidonis said. "There's places like that out there. The Wards, maybe. Hell, Omega's like that, in a really fucked-up, twisted way. But here, what counts is people."

"I don't get it."

"Think anarchy versus corporatism. All for one, then one gets cut up while they're still alive then divided among all. You don't know people with power? You're nobody. You're worse than nobody; you're a body. Nothing more. People see this place, see the city, see the wealth, they think it's all smiles and rainbows coming out your ass. Make it big on your own merits. The Deinech Dream. If you've got talent, you can do anything. Bullshit. If you've got talent, you pray to whatever gods you can think of that you either get picked up or get brains enough to know you shouldn't be on this planet before you die. That's it. People survive. People are collective, they support each other. It all sounds noble and selfless, but it's a biological pyramid. You need others with you so you can be above them. Persons... street scum like you and me don't matter. We're locked out unless we get lucky. We try starting something ourselves, we get shut down. Permanently. Status quo is god, and Valac's the temple."

"Why can't I ever go anywhere nice?"

"I thought you said you were C-Sec."

"The Citadel? Even before the geth, it was broken. It's the same problem as here, actually, in an odd way. Status quo. The humans are changing that. A council seat inside half a century is incredible, and there were more and more of them entering C-Sec when I left. But humans aren't all the sort of chaotic thugs the media likes to say they are, make no mistake. They've got just as many inflexible hardasses, the kind of bureaucratic idiots that stop anything from changing and make it impossible for you to make a difference. It's shiny and roomy, but rotten. It's like a drug; you think it's nice, it feels nice, but it's killing you inside and you don't even realise it."

Sidonis shrugged and stood up straight. "Way of the world. Now, are we gonna stand here bitching all day about how there's no justice in the galaxy, or are we gonna make some of our own?"

Garrus grinned. "That's what I try to tell myself."

"And that's what Chirin told me," Sidonis said. He stepped out into the downpour, and his scalp was instantly drenched. "Curse the darkness all you like, but you'd better pack a fucking flamethrower."

The first of the two they tried was dead. Within the past week, as it turned out. There were conflicting stories ghosting around the corners of the extranet about exactly what had happened, everything from stumbling onto some insane conspiracy to being caught in some inter-gang or inter-family crossfire. It didn't really matter any more. All that mattered was that he'd been found face down in two inches of his own piss and blood with a torso like a coliander. One leak too many.

The second was still alive. Twenty minutes' walk, although it was more a sort of constant motion of elbowing a way through the crowd, brought them to a run-down office block in a side-street just off one of the Lines' arterial roads. The buzz of traffic and general urban bustle was still just as loud, or even louder than it had been; the pools of stagnant water on the ground looked like they would have been shaking from the noise even if the rain had subsided. The building itself didn't inspire confidence; it was maybe twenty stories, rising up over a hundred metres, but it was dilapidated and ancient. The style was of the same blocky practicality that characterised the rest of the city, but here the walls were filthy and shot with cracks, the lower floors drowned in graffiti.

"Boy, she ain't doing too well for herself," Sidonis said, as they reached the building. "Last time I saw her, she worked out of a better place than this."

"Hard times?" Garrus said.

Sidonis shrugged, sending a cascade of droplets flying from his shoulders. "Is there another kind?"

The elevator ride up was slow, cramped, and filled with the peculiar odour of a dozen species' piss. There hadn't even been a reception, just a flickering old screen showing the names of each office's occupant next to the number. Most of them were blank._ What does that say, in a city with population density like this?_

The doors slid reluctantly open and they emerged into a grey corridor, dust piled up in corners and paint peeling from mouldy walls. The place had been built so cheaply that it had used building materials that hadn't been legal in centuries in Citadel space. They say it's dangerous, and on this evidence I'm inclined to agree.

"These places are where you end up if you've really got nothing," Sidonis said, as they walked along the hall. Their footsteps echoed loudly on the grime-streaked floor. "The Lines is a pretty shitty place to work anyway, and this is the worst of the worst. Vicious cycle. You can't make money, you end up here; you end up here, you can't make money. Even I worked out of a better place than this."

"Somehow, this does not fill me with confidence about our prospects," Garrus said.

"Vunas wasn't that bad, though," Sidonis said, looking vaguely concerned. "I always thought she'd get killed before she got picked up, true, but I didn't expect her to end up here."

"So your choices are promotion, death, or a terrible office?"

"Pretty much."

"And here I thought the rest of the galaxy would be different to C-Sec."

They came up to the door. Garrus could tell by the faint shadows on the scratched metal that it had had a number on it at one point. It still did, in a sense; the digits '1725' were just about legible in the faded lines, despite the numbers themselves having vanished long ago.

Sidonis pressed a buzzer to one side. Nothing happened.

After nothing had continued to happen for about twenty seconds, he pressed it again. Nothing delivered an astounding encore.

"This is ridiculous," Sidonis muttered, and hammered on the door with one armoured fist. "VUNAS! You'd better not be dead, bitch!"

There was a moment's silence before a faint voice floated through the door. "Fuck you!"

"Open the fucking door, woman, or I break it down!"

"This doesn't sound like a healthy professional relationship," Garrus said mildly.

There was another short silence, and then quiet footsteps behind the door. It swung inwards with a noise like a geth being tortured.

Behind it was a somewhat bedraggled asari, dressed in what looked suspiciously like a worn grey bathrobe. _Looks about eighteen, but don't let that fool you. She's probably lived longer than you ever will. Actually, make that definitely. I don't think they even leave home until they're something like sixty, and if I live that long I'm clearly doing something wrong._

She was also carrying a large shotgun.

"Hello, Vunas," Sidonis said cheerfully.

"Who are you, why should I care, and will anybody care if I kill you?"

"It's me."

"Yes, I can see that," the asari said, voice heavy with sarcasm. "Who's 'me'?"

Sidonis looked crestfallen. "You don't remember?"

"Listen, kid, there's a lot of turians in Valac, and you all look the same to me."

"Sidonis. Lantar Sidonis."

"I don't know a - wait, Sidonis?" The asari raised an eyebrow. "Aren't you dead?"

"I don't think so."

"Fair enough," she said, and slung the shotgun over a shoulder. That seemed to be that. "Any reason you're here, or did you just want to wake me up in the middle of the night?"

"It's early afternoon," Garrus pointed out.

"Really? Fuck. You lose track. Who the hell are you, anyway? Boyfriend?"

"He's not-" Sidonis began.

"We're not-" Garrus continued.

Vunas grinned widely. "You turians. So insecure."

"He's a, a professional partner," Sidonis said indignantly.

_Somehow, that makes it sound even worse._

"Garrus Vakarian," Garrus said, determined to make some headway. "I guess you could call me a potential customer."

"Now there's a couple of words I haven't heard in a long time," Vunas said, and yawned. "Come in, then."

She turned and walked back inside on bare feet. Sidonis shrugged and followed, and Garrus did the same. He closed the door behind them with another painful screech.

The room was small and grey and unkempt, exactly what you'd expect from the outside. There was a camp bed in one corner, sheets all over the place, clothes strewn across the floor and under the bed. A desk and chair by a narrow, polarised window. A small kitchen area, a miniature refrigeration unit and a heatbox on the counter above it. A door was set into the wall to the left, presumably leading to a small bathroom. That was about it. It was probably no more than four metres on a side. _I had more room in boot camp._

Vunas had slumped into the chair and put her feet up on the desk beside a holograhic computer pad, leaning back against the wall. The shotgun was still over her shoulder. Sidonis wandered over to the bed and sat down, leaving Garrus nowhere to sit. He opted for leaning against the wall, which, he could swear, creaked as it took his weight.

Vunas spread her arms. "So?"

"Fucking hell, Vunas, what happened?" Sidonis burst out. "You're better than this, aren't you?"

"Apparently not."

"I thought you'd have been picked up, or at least killed."

"Aww, you're so sweet," Vunas said, with roughly the tone of voice you'd expect from someone who's just been told that your pet had been accidentally killed by the people towing away your car. It was not a nice tone.

"So what happened?"

"Nothing. Mostly. Jobs come, jobs go, fewer and fewer every month. Cost of living goes up, what with those Tirius bastards and all. Money gets tight. Money gets tighter. Money runs out. Jobs run out. Life becomes increasingly depressing and pointless. Nobody cares enough to waste a shot on you. Nobody cares enough to hire you. In the end, I stop caring. Happy?"

_Honest, I'll give her that._

"Shit," Sidonis said contemplatively.

"Good summary."

"Why not leave?" Garrus said. "Go somewhere else?"

"You need money to get offworld. I don't have money. I can make enough to survive, but barely. And... I don't know. Does it really matter what planet you waste your life on?"

"You're an asari. You've got a millennium ahead of you. You're how old, eighty?"

"Eighty?" Vunas snorted. "Try thirty-five."

_Hell, she's younger than I am. I don't even want to think about how young that makes her for an asari._

"We can get you offworld," Sidonis said. "We have a ship. You don't need to stay here."

"And go where?"

"Anywhere!"

Vunas gazed at him for a moment, then looked away. "I don't need your charity. You want me to do a job, that's one thing. You want to treat me like some fucking street orphan on Bazia, that's another. So tell me. Why are you here? Or did you just come for the 'potential' lecture?"

Talk about hitting a nerve.

"OK," Sidonis said, sounding distinctly uneasy. "You heard about the Omega ship, right?"

"Please. I'm still in the know, don't insult me. I'm just not in the pay." Vunas paused for a second, then looked sharply around at Sidonis again. "Wait. You told me you had a ship."

"I think you get the idea."

The asari threw back her head and laughed bitterly at the ceiling. "Now here's a fucking turnup for the books. Cannon fodder like you suddenly own the most valuable ship since the Fiele... you've gotta laugh. Or cry."

"It's not really mine," Sidonis admitted. "It's more... his."

Vunas glanced up at Garrus. "Ah, your, what was it? Professional partner. Garrus Varanius."

"Uh, Vakarian," Garrus corrected.

"Whatever." She fixed him with a long, measured stare. "Riddle me this, Garrus Vakarian. I saw the broadcast, like everyone else with an extranet connection and the ability to comprehend basic arithmetic - which, by the way, is a surprisingly small percentage of the general galactic population. I know what it can do. I know what it's worth - actually, I don't. Nobody does. And you're working with Sidonis, who isn't exactly a brilliant strategist. I doubt you are, to be frank. So tell me. How the fuck did you get that thing, and how the fuck did you make the galaxy think it's shrapnel?"

Sidonis filled her in on the fine details, and her laugh got ever more incredulous and bitter as he went on.

"You got in with Vult?" she said at last. "Vult. Rodents like you move on up, and I'm here in the shit's shit. What does that say about us?"

"I couldn't have done it without your info," Sidonis said. "I'd still be nothing if I hadn't known you."

"You brought down the company and killed most of their people," Garrus pointed out. "It's not as if it really helped you, being part of it."

"OK, OK," Sidonis snapped.

"In fact, they tried to kill you. And you're pretty much still nothing-"

"The point is, you're good, Vunas. We need to know where this ship came from and who's interested in it, and you're the only one who can tell us."

Vunas regarded him with calm, neutral eyes for a second. "'Only one', huh? Is that because I'm good, or because everyone else you knew is dead?"

Sidonis didn't answer.

"Thought so. I keep track of these things too, you know. I watched as they all moved on... or passed on, as it were. And you come back, years later, and you come to me, the first job I've had in months. Face it, I'm not hot property. Not in this market, anyway. So when you come here and say I'm the only one, I don't see it as a compliment."

Sidonis shrugged. "Sorry."

Vunas leant forwards, letting her chair clatter back onto the floor and activated her computer, which lit up with a fierce, flourescent yellow glow. "I can help you with the basics. My information's still solid, though obviously not what you'd get from the top sources. I'll pull what I can from the family chatter, though my guess is you'd be best off looking along corporate lines. What I can give you quickly is basic, but I need time for anything detailed."

"That'd be great," Garrus said, more for something to say than anything else. "What do you charge per day?"

"You know," the asari said, scratching her fringe idly, "I've forgotten. It's been so fucking long... call it a thousand credits. Sound fair?"

"Yeah," Garrus said, speaking up before Sidonis had a chance to complain. He had a feeling he'd have been willing to pay a lot more than that._ Going soft in your old age?_

"Great. That's probably another year in this puddle sorted, then," Vunas said drily. "I can hardly wait."

"We need to know everything you can find," Sidonis said. "Everything. We have the ship, but it's built so that it's absolutely untraceable. You're basically all we have."

"Yeah? Tell me, then, Sidonis... is it really what the broadcast said it was?"

Sidonis glanced at Garrus, with a momentary flash of pain running across his face._ Don't have to be a psychologist to know he's thinking about her. He hides it well, make no mistake, but that's what worries me. There's dealing with it, and there's ignoring it. He's young. Immature. And I know his type. They confuse the two, they think you can lock it away and never have to deal with it again and close the file. And it festers and gnaws until the whole inside is stripped and dying, and then..._

_Of course, might not happen. Reading into it a little too much. But I've seen it happen before, and it worries me. A man who's broke on the inside can look normal, act normal, be normal... right up to the moment when he can't._

Sidonis breathed in, audible across the room, and looked back to Vunas' questioning eyes. "Yeah," he said. "It is. It could kill billions on any planet in the galaxy, and we can't disable it. Fuck, it's even told us it'll prevent any course of action it says endangers the ship unnecessarily. So we can't destroy it, and if we did we'd lose access to all that information stored up inside."

"A bind," Vunas said distantly. "You want the designer."

"Anyone who knows how to build it has to be silenced," Garrus said. "It's obscene. It can't be allowed to exist."

"They said that about a lot of things. Doesn't mean they died out."

"Leave that to us," said Sidonis. "Your job is to track down the bastards who built it and point us in the right direction. We'll take it from there."

"May the Goddess preserve us. It's an odd world, isn't it? A few years ago you were a point-two-bit merc paying me to find a job, any job, and here you are now saving the galaxy."

_At least I have some experience there._

"Wouldn't be any fun otherwise," Sidonis said, smiling thinly.

"Ah, fun," Vunas said. "I remember that. I think."

There was a silence of about ten seconds, broken only by the constant background patter of rain against the darkened window.

The asari yawned again, then set to typing something. "Send me your contact details," she said, without looking up. "And money. I'll update you later today once I've got the bare basics of the traffic flow, but I can't guarantee any progress. I've still got a few dozen contacts across the Terminus Systems, so I'll see what I can get from them. Other than that, you're on your own. Have fun saving the galaxy."

"You sure you don't want to come with us once this is done?" Garrus asked. _Dammit, I'm hoping for her to say 'yes'. I feel all misogynistic now._

_Oh god, I just realised she isn't wearing any underwear._

"Frankly, I don't think either of you will be alive when 'this' is over," Vunas said matter-of-factly. "Odds aren't great for me either. But if we all live, then no. I don't need charity, I don't need to be on any other planet, and I don't need you, don't you dare try and tell me I do. I'll work for you, same as I would for anyone else with the creds. What I won't let you do is try to change me."

"Surely anything is better than this, though?"

"If it is, I'll walk there on my own two feet. Life's an experience, for better or for worse. The only thing worse than this is being somewhere better than this because of your, your divine intervention. Rely on others, you're weak."

"Being alone makes you even weaker," Garrus said. "Trust me on that."

"Different kinds of weakness. Physically, yeah. My biotics aren't strong, this shotgun's a piece of crap. Most of the city could roll me up and use me to wipe their collective ass and I couldn't do jack shit about it. But that's life. If you let yourself rely on others, when they're all gone - you'll fall. You do anything without working for it, you don't deserve to do it. Simple as. I'll take physical weakness over mental weakness any day."

"You don't become weak just because you rely on others."

"I'm done talking," Vunas said, and turned her attention back to her computer. "Shut the door on your way out."

Garrus shook his head and went to leave. _Some people you just can't reach, I guess. Way of the world._

In the corner, the bed creaked as Sidonis got up. He followed Garrus to the door, but turned back as he opened it with another screech.

"Thanks, Vunas," he said, with some sincerity in his voice. "It's good to know there's someone who can help."

Vunas snorted derisively. "Don't get your hopes up too high, scales. They can always come crashing down. This city isn't forgiving."

"Well, that makes it a fair match," Garrus said. "Neither are we."


	10. Divine Intervention: Concerns

**DIVINE INTERVENTION**

**THREE: CONCERNS**

* * *

_Just once. _

_Just once, I'd like to work with someone who doesn't have an obvious personality disorder. Is that too much to ask?_

_Then again, maybe that's what makes people good at what they do. Broken on the inside means they're perfect on the outside. Interesting theory, if not one that bodes well for mental stability among the elite. Next thing you know, and they'll have psychologists on the bridges of battle cruisers._

The rain was just as heavy as they left the building, maybe even heavier. Garrus welcomed it. Just being in there had left him feeling vaguely dirty, and the cool beat of rain on his head was doing something to clear that away. Water was swirling around his boots, constantly draining away into large grates set into the concrete, presumably being used to generate energy or just being ferried away back into the ocean. The streets of Valac were as crowded and noisy as in any other megacity in the galaxy, but they were cleaner; almost sterile, perenially scoured and scrubbed by the downpour. It felt almost like the Presidium had, the same sense of purity filling the air, but here it felt rougher, more natural. _Nice city. Shame about the people._

"God," Sidonis said, as the door banged shut behind them. "You know how cities get nicknames? Nos Astra is the Shining Star, Medior is the Metal Heart, New York is the Big Apple, that sort of thing. They call Valac 'Fuck-Up City'. Easy to see why."

"Why did she want to stay?" Garrus asked. "We were offering a way out, free of charge-"

"And there's your problem. What made Vunas good... and what screwed everything up, I guess... was that she's honest."

"Honest."

"Yeah. It means she's trustworthy. She'll do whatever she can to help us. She'll give us our money's worth, that's for sure."

"How can that hurt her? Surely it would get her more business-"

Sidonis rolled his eyes and set off down the street. "You need to get into the Deinech mindset," he said over his shoulder, as Garrus followed. "You assume honesty is a good thing. It's not. This is a crooked city. If you're straight, you get bent all out of shape. She'll never ask for more than's fair. She'll never slack off, never drag a job out, never sabotage her competitors for her own gain. It's not that she's naive, she understands exactly what's happening."

"So she'll never accept anything she doesn't think she's earned."

"Exactly. She's the wrong species. She should have been a turian."

"She'd have been better at it than we are," Garrus said.

"Well, that's not exactly difficult, is it?"

"Was her father a turian?"

"Actually, I heard volus."

"Volus? Really?"

"If it can be fucked, you can bet your life that there'll be an asari at the head of the queue," Sidonis said, shrugging. "I've seen all of them. Asari-elcor. Asari-hanar. Asari-vorcha, if you can believe it. They say it doesn't have any actual genetic effect, but I don't know. All I know is that the one asari I ever knew with a vorcha father was a fucking psychopath. Make of that what you will."

"You'd expect the daughter of a volus to be more, you know, dishonest and avaricious, if that were true," Garrus said.

"Well, it ain't a perfect science, you know? I mean, my dad was a religious guy, followed some salarian cult... well, religiously. Doesn't make yours truly the same way, but it'd have been more likely for me to join up than a random turian plucked off the street."

"Yeah," Garrus said uneasily. Words came floating back unbidden from the depths of his memory, harsh, shouted words - some of them his own, some of them his father's._ Last words we exchanged. Most of them curses. Wonder if we'll ever do it again?_

They came out into the main street again, pausing at the edge of the swirling mass of people. Those hoods really were popular. There were very few uncovered heads visible among the crowd, but those that went bareheaded were, as often as not, human. _The one species that's inconvenienced most by the rain and they're the ones who like it? I don't get humans. I don't think anybody does._

"So," said Sidonis, raising his voice above the crowd's hubbub. "We have a contact investigating for us. We have no more contacts left. We have more or less no money, no thanks to you. What do we do now?"

"Hell, I don't know," Garrus said. "Wait for her to tell us what we need, I guess. Head back to the ship. We have nothing else to do."

"I thought so." Sidonis inhaled deeply. "I just feel... so helpless, you know? It's ridiculous. We've got the ship, but there's no way we can destroy it. We're looking for whoever built it, but we don't know who, why, when, where, how..."

"I know. But we can't let up. We have to stop this and we're the only ones who know." As he said it, he sent a request for a cab off into the ether.

Sidonis shivered, and glanced up at the dour sky. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I guess so."

_Problem is, you're absolutely right. I don't think we'll ever find out, not with the resources we have. In the end, we'll just have to destroy the ship without Golf knowing and hope nobody ever uses the technology again. I don't like that. I don't like that at all. But what else is there to do? There's some sort of darker game being played here, but it's a game in another room, a game with rules we don't understand played by people we can't see, and I don't know if we're players or pawns. Maybe we're not part of it at all. Maybe the game's already over. Maybe it hasn't even begun. _

_There are too many variables, too many unknowns. It'll be tough. As if I expected anything but. Why is nothing ever easy?_

* * *

"This is the one?" the salarian said.

"Definitely."

"They called it the Hortensius. And they covered it up with civilian parts. Philistines." Contempt hung heavy in his voice as they stared up at the ship. "I mean, why would they do this?"

"As a disguise."

"Well, _yes_, but doing it this way is just wrong!"

The volus by his side cocked its head and glanced up at him. "Some might consider it an aesthetic improvement."

"And some might shut the hell up. You're absolutely certain?"

"Yes. My sensors have penetrated the outer hull completely. Sensat has equipped me well."

The salarian smiled thinly. "Can't deny that. And if this is our prey... then all we need to do is wait."

"And prepare."

"Well, yeah. You reckon it'll be Deus himself who comes for it?"

"Unlikely. He is cautious. It will be agents of his, probably Manus members. His most faithful ones, with whom he can trust the codes."

"Yeah. We can dream, though. What I wouldn't give to ram a grenade up his... then again, I guess Sensat would probably want him alive."

"Deus remains a secondary priority," the volus said calmly. "All we are concerned with is the acquisition of the codes to the ship and returning it to its rightful owner. Do not forget that. There are more important things at stake."

"He won't survive the week."

"I hope that will be the case."

The ship loomed huge, angular and grey in front of them. The docking berth was empty but for the two figures and the reason they were there, aside from their aircar - but that was well hidden, perched neatly behind the bulk of the ship. It was belching out huge, invisible clouds of anti-com chaff, just in case anyone had been left inside the ship that could have sent a warning, but it was apparently devoid of organic life.

"A cab is inbound to this berth section," the volus said suddenly. "No other vessels in the area are likely to be attended to at this time. It is possible that it contains Deus' agents."

"Shit," the salarian spat. "We need more time!"

"It is a lone car. It may be that preparations are not necessary."

The salarian squinted at him suspiciously. "What are you planning?"

"I am planning that they will not suspect the volus."

* * *

The cab flashed away into the sky again, two passengers lighter and a few dozen credits heavier. Sidonis watched it go with obvious distaste.

"Fucking asari. Even their damn cabs are overpriced," he said, as they left the cab rank for the docking superstructure. "You can't trust them with anything."

"Didn't we just trust one with several billion lives?" Garrus said, smiling.

"Hey, Vunas doesn't count."

"So you can't trust any asari... except for the ones you can."

"Yeah!"

Garrus shrugged. "Well, I have to say I probably agree with you there."

The door to the interior slid open, and they went in. The roar of the rain was suddenly cut to a faint, muffled patter as the door closed behind them. Garrus shook his head, dislodging a flurry of droplets from the crevices and chinks in his face. He could feel a few small patches of wetness between his skin and the plates covering it, a distinctly irritating sensation._ I need to buy one of those damn hoods. This can't be good for my silky-smooth, unblemished visage. Women across the galaxy will mourn the loss._

"I don't know if we can actually trust Vunas to get us the information, though," Sidonis mused, as they walked down the simple metal corridor. "I mean, we can trust her to do what she can. But you have to be prepared for the outcome that we're left with nothing. No leads, no idea where to look, just one big fucking galaxy giving us the finger."

"I am."

"What do we do then?"

"We have to destroy the ship. That's all we can do."

"Not gonna be easy."

"Nothing ever is," Garrus said, as they approached an elevator. It opened, revealing a trio of humans, who pushed past them without a moment's notice. They went in, and Sidonis punched in their destination. _Just a blank box? No windows? Even those ridiculously slow ones on the Citadel had windows._

"Seriously, how do we do it, Garrus?" Sidonis said. "It's impossible. We can't, like, crash it or something because it'll just take away control. And I don't want to be stuck on this damn planet again. I'd rather have Omega."

"We'll have to work out some way of disabling Golf, then. I don't know. We can't talk about it on board, anyway."

"Agreed. I know it's not an AI, but it's too damn close for my liking. Of course, you know a bit about that."

"Yeah," Garrus said, as the elevator whirred upwards. "You'd think people would learn not to create AIs. It only leads to violence and philosophising about the meaning of life and attempted mass murder. Well, I've already got the first two down."

Sidonis grinned. "Not planning on the third, I hope."

"Well, you know how it is. I like to keep my options open."

"Any mass in mind?"

"Politicians, possibly."

"Hey, you can't murder the barefaced," Sidonis said indignantly. "They don't count as alive."

They were still laughing when the elevator doors slid open, revealing another blank corridor. There were a few people moving up and down, in and out of various berths and elevators, but no more than a handful._ Not as much travel these days, I guess. Nothing like an extragalactic invasion to make people stay home. Stupid, really. If the Reapers had succeeded, a ship would have been the safest place to be. At least then you could try to escape._

"This takes far too long," Garrus said, as they set off for their berth, following the grimy signs set into the corridor's ceiling. "We need a car. That way, we could just fly right up."

"Forget it," Sidonis said shortly. "I'm not paying for a damn car. In fact, I'm never driving a car that contains you again. Not after last time."

"Hey, that wasn't my fault. Mostly."

"I think you're bad luck."

"...yeah, that's true," Garrus admitted. "And you don't even know about half the stuff we ended up in under Shepard's command."

Sidonis raised an eyebrow. "Like?"

"Well, there were all those times thousands of hostile robots tried to kill us," Garrus said, scratching his chin. "That was fun."

"Geth, mercs. Way I see it, they both go down if you put a hole in their heads."

"Point. I can't say what I've been up to since is really an improvement. At least we didn't have to worry about money back then. It seemed like we were getting thousands of credits just for killing geth."

"What, like a bounty system? Battle of the Citadel must have cost a fortune."

"No, they just had a lot of credits on them. Not sure why."

"Maybe we should join the hunt for the last few geth," Sidonis said thoughtfully. "Thousands, you say?"

"Yeah. By the end, Shepard was buying the whole team new armour and weapons every time we met a vendor. Not sure what happened to all of it. I think the Alliance requisitioned it back."

"Bastards."

Garrus shrugged. "Well, it was all old stuff. Technology marches on, and we're left scrambling in the wake. Take this new-fangled thermal clip system, for example."

"Doesn't really make sense, does it?" Sidonis said. "I mean, six months ago the best weapons could fire five shots a second for two minutes before overheating, and these days you're lucky if you get fifty shots before you need a new clip. Plus they take so long to cool down that once you're out of clips, you're pretty much out of shots."

"I still had an old-configuration sniper when the team split up," Garrus said. "It was beautiful. Steady as a rock, customised tri-vis sights, powerful enough to hole a wall at half a klick. You'd get fifteen shots before it overheated, and that's if you fired it like a pistol. I tried using it on a merc a couple of months ago, and it didn't even get past his shields. It cost something like two hundred grand new, and one tech jump later it's worthless."

"Couldn't you have had it upgraded?"

"I tried, but it was too highly engineered. Would have cost a fortune. I just bought a new one. 'Course, that went bye-bye when our friends in the Blood Pack decided they hadn't committed enough murder and made a move for the ship. Shame. I'd paid ten grand for that."

"Any good?"

"Not bad," Garrus said, as they turned a corner and came into another empty stretch of corridor. "I had a little money, at least. Prophetic Visions had to pay me twenty thousand credits as part of the agreement when they bought the rights to make a holo about the battle of the Citadel."

"Only twenty?"

"Hell, I'm lucky to get anything. Shepard demanded that everyone on her crew get paid as part of the deal. Without that, she'd have been about a million creds richer." Not that it would have exactly made a difference.

Sidonis whistled appreciatively. "That mean I'm gonna see your name in the credits? Assuming I live to see the flick, that is."

"Don't think so. Last I heard, Garrus Vakarian had been replaced with Gara Velancia."

"Wait wait wait. They made you into a woman?"

"And an asari."

Sidonis snorted with laughter. "God, that's fucking brilliant. Didn't you already have an asari on your team?"

"You say that like you think racial diversity is a factor they care about."

"Ah," Sidonis said sagely. "Sex appeal."

"No, you've got it the wrong way round," Garrus said, struggling to hide a grin. "See, with me in it there would have been too much sex appeal. Audiences can only handle so much, you know."

"You're not nearly as funny as you think you are," Sidonis said, but he was fighting a losing battle against his own smile.

The signs hanging from the ceiling at intervals of a couple of hundred metres had been counting up from B-125 since the corner. When they finally came to the sign proclaiming B-127, it came as a relief. _Dammit, this place is enormous. Couldn't they put more elevators in?_

_I can't believe I just thought that. I've had enough elevators to last a lifetime. Besides, this place is too cheaply built for luxury like that. The bloody signs aren't even electronic! Probably some half-assed krogan construction firm- hey, that's not right._

That last was what went through his mind when the door to the pad hissed open. The bulk of it was correct - the blast of rain-specked cold air from the open side of the platform was present and correct, while the ship was also definitely the former if probably not the latter, thirty-odd metres away from the door. The debris of waist-high crates that always seemed to accumulate everywhere and general mechanical detritus were there, as usual. But what wasn't usual was the volus standing about ten metres in front of them.

He looked like... well, he looked like a volus. Short, squat, with that inevitable air of looking congealed rather than grown, and suited head to toe in dark material. The suit design was slightly unusual, at least; it was a dull red, and both the main material and the joints looked of higher-quality engineering than most of the suits you saw. The headpiece was thinner and more streamlined, the orange eyes somehow a little more menacing in design, the mouthpiece flatter and smoother. Two thin strips of what looked like black rubber ran up the crown as raised ridges.

There was something else, as well... something in the way he stood, in the way he was built. _Your average volus, they look like a big, heavy sphere resting on two detached thighs. This one looks trimmed, as much as a volus can, and those legs are strong, almost stiff. Interesting._

_Very interesting._

He found himself nudging his assault rifle with his shoulder. It was still hanging over it, comforting as ever.

_Interesting doesn't mean good. I don't like this, even if he is just a volus._

"Afternoon, friend," Sidonis said, pronouncing the last word in that special way that made it sound a lot like 'asshole'. "Looks to me like you're lost."

"Lost, yes," the volus said. "That must be it. My mind tends to wander, and my body with it. My apologies."

"Bull," Garrus said flatly, and yanked his gun from his shoulder, bringing it up to bear in one fluid motion.

"You sure?" Sidonis asked. He'd drawn his own piece, a powerful pistol, but had kept it pointed at the floor. "He's just a volus, man. Not even armed. What can he do?"

"He shouldn't be here. He's not lost."

"I don't know what you mean," the volus said. "I'm sorry that I accidentally came into your berth-"

"That corridor is hundreds of metres long," Garrus said. "You've been waiting here for us. We'd have seen you if you'd gone in in the last few minutes."

"He's right," Sidonis said, and levelled his pistol at the volus's head. "Who are you, and what the fuck do you want?"

"Interesting questions both," the volus said. "Almost all of us believe we understand the former and many of us the latter, but is that really the truth?"

"Uh, yeah," Sidonis said. "Start talking, rubber boy."

Something was niggling at the back of Garrus's mind, something that he couldn't put his finger on. Something was wrong. Something small, but something significant. _Dammit, think. What's missing?_

"Certainly. Do you have a particular topic in mind?"

Sidonis snarled. "Don't fuck with me and maybe I won't fuck with you. Why are you here, who are you, what do you want. Simple. No tricksy answers."

_Breathing._

_Volus always make that hiss when they breathe, that sharp inhalation. He's not making it._

_What does that mean?_

_It means his suit is well-designed. Much better than the standard crap the volus churn out. That means one of two things: one, he's rich, very rich. That's troubling. But two is even worse: some sort of special-forces armour. That's high-quality engineering, and the design's meant to be less ridiculous than normal. They're a client race... but who knows what their clans have cooked up? Or maybe he represents a Valac family, or a syndicate... could be anything. All bad._

_Very bad. What's his game?_

The volus was speaking again, a calm, measured, deep voice. _Very un-volus._

"-well, if that is all you wish to know. My name is Melenis, to answer one. And to answer the further two: you are in possession of something that belongs to my employer. I am here to repossess it. If you are willing to comply, violence will not be necessary."

"Violence will not be necessary, he says," Sidonis said contemptuously. "Who the fuck do you think you are? We don't have your thing, whatever it is. Get out of here before I send your fat ass over the edge and watch you splatter like a paia fruit."

"It's the ship," Garrus said aloud. "He's after the ship."

"Oh, fuck," Sidonis pronounced.

"Yes," "Transmit the codes now and you will not be harmed."

"I don't know how you know we're here, or what this ship is," Garrus said coldly, "but I will not allow it to fall into anybody else's hands. Who is your employer?"

"You might call him a friend of yours."

"Ours?" Sidonis said. "Sorry to disappoint, tubby, but we don't work for anyone but ourselves."

Melenis didn't speak for a second, as if thinking it over. When he spoke again, his voice hadn't changed at all.

"Perhaps this is the story you have been given. It is a pointless facade. I know all too well of Deus's involvement – and your employment by him."

"Deus?" Garrus said. "Listen, I don't know what-"

"Do not play dumb with me any longer, Palaven-clan," Melenis said, and though his voice was as calm as ever, it suddenly felt a lot more threatening. "I have told you: it is useless."

"And we've told you that you can take your Deus, whoever the fuck they are, and shove it up your ass," Sidonis said. "Our ship. Us. Only us. Not yours, not this 'employer' of yours': ours. You're not getting those codes. Full fucking stop."

There was another brief pause before the volus sighed audibly. "I wish this could have been resolved with words alone. In this galaxy, perhaps this is a futile wish."

He fell silent. Garrus glanced at Sidonis, who was looking as confused as Garrus felt.

_What is this?_

He was answered after a fashion by a sudden loud hum, rising in pitch, from the direction of Melenis. The volus wasn't moving. That made it all the worse.

"Bomb?" Sidonis asked, backing away. His voice was taut, terse. "Weapon? What do we do? Tell me what to _do_!"

"No idea-" Garrus started to say, and then the volus exploded outwards.

Its legs suddenly more than doubled in size, the whir and clank of metal suggesting some sort of expansive engineering. They propelled the torso up by well over half a metre, lengthening and widening at the same time as the suit expanded to cover the sudden increase in height. The feet drove outwards until they were two dinner-plate-sized metallic cups, massive supports for a massive body. Even as every thought fled from Garrus's mind, he couldn't help but wonder at the sheer technology behind it, the level of the engineering that had to be behind the change – the mind of a technician always looks for the explanation before the solution, and this was one hell of an explanation.

The arms did a similar thing – starting as short and stubby, useless for anything more strenuous than using a computer, they doubled in width and in length, developing elbows as the suit moved to cover it. The whole thing was done under a storm of mechanical grinding and shifting as the volus grew and grew, until after less than three seconds there was hardly a trace of the short, fat, bipedal sphere that had stood before them.

In its place was a red giant, over two metres tall, supported by legs far thicker and heavier than Garrus's own, bearing arms that looked stronger than those on heavy mechs. The head looked almost comically small perched atop the heavy mass, but it had gone straight through ridiculous into terrifying. What had been a fat, useless body now seemed huge and powerful – stronger, bigger, a lot more dangerous. Two sharp, narrow orange eyes glared down at them like miniature searchlights.

There was a second's pause as Garrus mentally rebooted. Sidonis was the first to speak.

"_What._"

Somehow, it said it all.

"This... this is bad," Garrus said slowly. "I think this is a bad thing."

"Yes," Sidonis said. "I think you're right."

"I offer one final chance," Melenis said, in exactly the same glass-smooth tone. "Transmit the code package, or I will take it. I cannot guarantee your survival."

Garrus narrowed his eyes, and forced his assault rifle's stock hard into his shoulder, letting the sights wander up to the volus's head. _Incredible. That's technology I didn't even know existed. Has to be some serious nanoengineering, maybe smaller still. Someone with a lot of know-how is backing this guy. We're up against the big guns, and you don't get much smaller than us._

_But we can't afford to lose._

"Sorry," he said, and tightened his finger on the trigger until it seemed like a gentle breeze would be enough to set it off. "That's not going to happen. You want this ship? You and the rest of the galaxy. Take it if you can."

Everything seemed to stand on edge for a second, all the colours infinitesimally sharper, every tiny sound – the short, soft rush of his breath, the triple bass boom of his heart in his ears, the barely perceptible scrapes and clinks of his armour and rifle as his position shifted ever so slightly – rushed into the foreground, impossibly loud, as the volus – _that's not a volus any more, he's more machine than flesh –_ simply stood there.

_Adrenaline. My old friend. People talk about all the best drugs, your vesh and your iolu and your FFC – I've tried every one of them, and not one can come close to this rush, when you know everything's about to go straight to hell and you're riding along and laughing all the way, when your blood's singing and your brain's burning and you feel like you're just about ready to explode... the most dangerous addiction in the galaxy, and god help me, I love it._

Movement. The volus had been ten metres away, but somehow that had shortened to less than five and closing like a shark in the blink of an eye, and the pounding of those terrible feet on the ground was roaring in his ears – and his finger, bypassing conscious thought with the soldier's instinct he'd worked on all his life, had shut tight on the trigger. Bright snaps of energy hammered out of his rifle and drove it hard into his shoulder, every one of them a direct hit on the vast target; every one snuffed out in a blue wink against shielding that had to be stronger than you'd see on most combat vehicles, and still the volus was coming – Sidonis's pistol was spitting away to his left, but even his heavier shots were being evaporated instantaneously – and suddenly a piston fist was coming up faster than anyone without cybernetic enhancements could have possibly reacted, and then everything went sideways.

It seemed to take an age, as if he was stuck in one of those bad holos where everything seems to be filmed in slow motion. The cartwheel through the air was flawless, one complete rotation as the world span gently in front of his eyes. The landing wasn't.

Garrus's back and head hit the ground first, and those familiar purple spots started their stately dance in front of his eyes as what little breath was remaining was driven out of him. He tried to get up, but his legs had staged a minor mutiny and decided they would rather lie quietly for a while.

_Oh, and the judges won't like that!_ rang out a voice in his head, and then his gun clattered to a stop a couple of feet away, its strap snapped and torn away on one side. Ignoring the pain as best he could, he stretched out an arm for it – and then a lump of heavy metal screamed down from the sky and crushed it utterly in a spray of sparks and brief burst of heat.

Garrus looked up.

Melenis looked down.

A hand – _but it feels so mechanical, it's not a real hand, can't be_ – closed around his head like a traditional fairground claw and lifted him bodily until his legs were dangling uselessly in the air beneath him. He tried to make out something through the pain, but all he could see was that those orange beams were below him now.

"I do not enjoy this," something said, and then he was flying backwards, his head free of the hand if not of the pain. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something odd, something he couldn't make sense of – as if in a photograph, he saw a freeze frame of Sidonis being catapulted off his feet by what looked like a brilliant orange sphere a few feet away from him, and he could make out every detail of his face, of the mouth open in a shout of pain and surprise, spittle flecking the air in front of him, eyes wide and pupils narrow. Only once he hit the ground and heard, dimly, as if underwater, the heavy shockwave and felt the heat on his face did he realise it was an explosion, and then pain took over again.

_Who did that? He was concentrating on me..._

The question didn't seem relevant any more. He tried to get up, pushing himself upwards with his arms, ignoring the blood jetting into his mouth, but those damn legs wouldn't listen. He tried again, willing every atom of his body to _move_, to defend itself, and the legs creaked and screeched under him as he rose unsteadily to his feet.

Sidonis was on the ground, unmoving. The volus, or whatever the hell it was, was standing over him, inspecting – but as Garrus struggled upwards, those burning, unblinking eyes snapped around to him again, and metal crashed into metal as tree-trunk legs marched towards him.

All he could do was stand, it was taking everything he had just to stay upright. Vision blurred, sounds mixed together. All that was certain were those eyes and the clang of those feet.

_Two hits... two hits did this to me._

_What is this thing?_

It was already in front of him, towering over him as he swayed gently beneath its shadow.

"Transmit the codes. Now."

No change in tone.

Garrus tried to speak, but forgot about the blood in his mouth. Some of it spilled down his chin, dying it the same colour as his tattoos; the rest he swallowed, forcing the coppery taste down his throat.

_I'm far too familiar with that taste._

He tried again.

"I don't know who you are," he said, and his voice was little more than a hoarse wheeze, all he could manage. "I don't know who you work for. I don't know who this Deus is, I don't know why you think I work for him. I don't know why your employer wants this ship. I don't know how you know it's still intact, I don't know how you found it, I don't know _what_ the hell you _are._ I'll tell you what I know." He breathed in, and his bruised lungs burned agonisingly. Every second was a fight for consciousness, every word a battle that was getting harder and harder to wage. _And when I go down, who says I'm getting up again? These could be your last words, Garrus. Pick them carefully._

_I know._

"I know that you," he said, staring straight into Melenis's blank eyes, "and anyone else in the galaxy who wants to use the ship, can go fuck yourselves."

_There. That should do._

The volus looked down impassively, and knocked him onto his back with a jab to the midriff. Consciousness started to fade, blackness eating away at the edges of his vision. Before that, a shape moved to the side of the vast figure of the volus-thing, and said a few words. He could only catch some of them as his ears gently shut down.

"...just out... this one?"

"Unconsc..."

"...d … take them..."

A hand closed around his leg and dragged him away. As his head bumped and scraped along the floor, the last few scraps of light in his eyes died away, but not before one last thought had time to flash across his mind.

_Oh no._

_Not again._


	11. Divine Intervention: Guests

**DIVINE INTERVENTION**

**FOUR: GUESTS**

* * *

_Evidently, I have missed an important development in galactic etiquette. It appears that the usual method of greeting has changed to include knocking me unconscious. Either that, or I'm just that annoying._

_Talk about the lesser of two evils._

For what seemed like the twentieth time in the last month, Garrus awoke with a splitting headache and the undeniable feeling that somebody was seriously contemplating killing him. The latter felt much like the former.

At least this time his vision was clearer, the trauma to his head less dramatic, the risk of brain damage encouragingly low. _Think positive. You're still alive._

_How many times have I thought exactly that recently?_

He was in a room. That much was obvious from the featureless metal wall about five feet away from him. It didn't seem too bad a room, as places to wake up in having been beaten and abducted by mysterious cyborgs went. A quick mental calculation put it at roughly four metres by four. _A good size for a prison cell. Still, mustn't complain._ _Clean, well-lit, devoid of devices designed to delicately reconfigure various bodily extremities. No blood on the floor._ _Then again, that could be bad. The Blood Pack never bothered to clean their floor, and they're largely incompetent. That means you have a chance. If your captors wipe the blood away, that means they mean business. The bad, 'you're probably not leaving here alive' kind of business. And on this planet, business is good._

_Dammit, what happened to 'think positive'?_

He tried to move his hands, not really out of an expectation that he'd be able to. It just seemed like the thing to do. He was rewarded with absolutely no movement, though he could dimly feel something hard pressing against his wrists, which were held tightly behind his back.

_OK, par for the course._

He was sitting down in what felt like a metal chair. A cautious investigation revealed the back to be far too tall to scrape his hands over, and another told him it was heavy enough to stay stuck to the floor no matter what he did.

_Ooh, professional. I'm flattered._

A painful look over his shoulder revealed nothing else was in the room but a door. It looked suitably forbidding, a heavy rectangular block of grey metal. _Not a good sign._

_So, situation._

_Blank room, alone. Sidonis isn't here, so... either dead or held somewhere else. Hopefully the second. Most likely the first. Too much to hope that he's somehow free and getting Golf to help, I suppose. Or Vunas. Or anyone._

_OK. Definite number of at least two I'm facing, but the volus-thing counts as two. Or five. That, and the nature of the room, tells me they're working for someone who knows very much what they want and have a good idea how to get it. High-tech, low-number, hit hard and hit fast. That's classic special-ops tactics right there._

_So, whoever this is is pretty serious. They want the ship. Of course. How did they know it's here? Interesting question. Everyone thought it was destroyed but them. So, we conclude: one, they are extremely lucky. Doubtful in the extreme. If not, then two: they have some way of knowing where the ship is at all times. That implies to me that they are either deeply familiar with it, seeing as how they penetrated our disguise, or actually created it. Either way, it seems we've found what we're looking for, if not in exactly the way we wanted to._

_But then we come to the mysteries. Who is this 'Deus' the volus was talking about, and why do they think we're working for him? A former owner of the ship, quite possibly. An enemy of our captors? Almost certainly. Does that make him our ally?_

_I doubt it._

His reverie was interrupted after he knew not how long by the sound of the door sliding smoothly open. He twisted around to see who was there, tendons in his neck screaming at yet more abuse, and saw Melenis standing in the doorway. He was back at a more reasonable, less terrifying and impossible size now, but somehow that made him even more menacing, knowing what he was capable of. Behind him was another figure, presumably the other one he'd seen at the port, but now he could identify it as a salarian, a mottled brown-green specimen. He was wearing what looked like finely engineered light armour, a dark metallic bronze in colour, inlaid with white piping. _Stylish, I'll give him that, but generally speaking, ugly is better. People assume you're more important if your armour's shinier. Might as well paint a target on your chest._

As he walked past Garrus, he could see one of those leather hoods hanging from the collar-piece of the suit. The volus followed suit, and as he passed Garrus found himself staring at that unnatural, mechanical gait again. Melenis didn't give him a second glance.

"Ah," the salarian said, in that distinctive tone of theirs. _At least this one doesn't appear to be a seven-foot mutating cyborg thing. Key word 'appear'._ "You're conscious. Good."

_Oh, I don't like the way he said 'good'._

"Your friend," Melenis said, "is not a helpful man by nature."

"Gotta say you're right there," Garrus conceded.

The volus didn't reply, instead strolling – _well, stalking, maybe –_ over to a corner and standing there as if on guard. The salarian moved around in front of him and leaned back against the wall, staring at him intently with large, dark eyes.

"Hello," Garrus said. "I'm fine, by the way. How are you?"

"Ah, a wise-guy," the salarian said. "Your friend is much the same. Except without the 'wise'."

"Does any of this serve a purpose, or is this just a communal 'bash Sidonis' session?" Garrus said cheerily. "Because I have a few points there, you know? For a start, he can't cook to save his life – and when you spend two weeks stuck on the same ship as the man, you'd better believe that matters-"

"Yes, let's talk 'ship', shall we?" the salarian said. "Sidonis has proved somewhat difficult to extract information from."

"Yes, I can imagine. My sympathies."

"However, _Garrus_," he continued, "perhaps you'll be more helpful."

"First-name terms already? I should warn you, I never kiss on a first date."

The salarian snorted. "See, this is why I love interrogating turians. The backchat is always top-notch. Better than batarians, anyway... all you get from them are obscene threats, and not even creative ones..." He seemed to lose his train of thought, then blinked and refocused dark eyes on Garrus. "I'll play along, then. Call me Erash. My partner here, as I believe you may have been informed, goes by the name of Melenis."

"Not a volus name," Garrus said.

"I am a volus. It is my name," Melenis said from the corner. "Overarching racial culture is not everything, Mr. Vakarian, as I am sure you full well understand."

"What happened to 'Palaven-clan'?"

"To call you thus was impolite on my part. I apologise."

"You _know_," Garrus said, "there may be some out there who would consider the whole beating-abduction-imprisonment-interrogation thing impolite."

"A necessary evil."

"Ah. One of them. Why are they always so much worse than regular evils?"

"An interesting subject, upon which I have written extensively-" the volus began.

"Can you go five fucking minutes without promoting your goddamn philosophy textbooks?" Erash snapped. "There are more important things we need to worry about. And don't you dare say that there aren't, because there _are_."

"As you say."

"See, classic relationship trouble right there," Garrus said. "It's the power imbalance. It was doomed to failure from the start, I say. Giant-scary-cyborg-salarian couples weren't meant to be."

"Do you want me to shoot you?" Erash said. "Because I'd be happy to." He tapped an expensive-looking pistol strapped to his belt. It was short, snub-nosed, grey and nondescript, yet somehow it oozed an air of high-quality engineering. _My technician senses are tingling!_

"Don't you need me alive to give you those codes?" Garrus said, keeping one eye on the piece.

"Well..." the salarian said, as if weighing it up in his head, "nobody said shooting you had to be lethal."

"...true," Garrus said. "However, I've gotta say... it doesn't matter how many times you shoot me. You might as well put one in my head, because I'll never give you the codes."

"Sidonis told us that as well, although you're at least calmer. However, he doesn't have the codes. You do. His opinion is not exactly relevant, correct?"

"Finally, non-partisan confirmation. Can I put that on a certificate? 'The opinions and beliefs of Lantar Sidonis are hereby officially proclaimed irrelevant', or something like that. It would make such a good nameday present."

Erash sighed, and leaned back against the wall. "Can we please skip the comedy?"

"What good is an interrogation without a little witty repartee? It's what helps establish our hero's immense willpower and loveable personality."

"Unfortunately for you, you're not the hero," Erash said. "You're a henchman."

"Ah, I was wondering when we'd get to this," Garrus said brightly. "Let's talk about this 'Deus' of yours who I'm apparently a henchman of, shall we? Who is he, and why the hell do you think we work for him?"

The two in front of him exchanged glances. Whatever it meant, it looked significant, if only because of how unreadable both faces were.

"Now," the salarian said thoughtfully, "here is where things become interesting."

"I don't think I can handle much more interest. Could you maybe make it boring? Have Melenis tell me."

"The code package is of a unique design," the volus said. "It cannot be copied, edited, split or hacked. It can only be transferred by mutual consent-

"Or torture," Garrus interjected. "Torture works too."

"Indeed," Melenis said matter-of-factly - _which is probably worse than saying it while holding a knife and smiling evilly. At least then you know they have a little sense of the theatrical, and that's always something you can exploit_. "The fact that you are the current bearer of the package suggests to me that you are trusted absolutely by Deus."

"Or maybe that I have nothing to do with him?"

"A possibility," Melenis conceded. "But this presents a new problem: that of how you claimed the codes initially."

"At gunpoint."

"Naturally," Melenis said drily. "From a member of Manus Dei?"

"I don't know that name. Mercs?"

There was another short pause while more glances were exchanged.

"Get Sidonis," Erash said finally.

"Yes," Melenis said. _Now, is that him agreeing, or taking an order? Could be valuable information. Unlikely, seeing as how that requires my survival, but the potential's there._

The volus left the room, feet clanking slowly against the floor as he passed Garrus. Erash was scratching his chin, looking faintly agitated.

"Listen," Garrus said, attempting to lean forwards as much as he could with his wrists locked tight behind him, "you're wrong. We're alone, we have no ties to Deus. We don't know who he is, we don't know what he wants. All I care about is destroying this ship and stopping whoever knows how to build it from making more."

The salarian regarded him with dark, deep, emotionless eyes.

"We'll see."

The door slid open again, and those familiar footsteps started up again on the floor – only now they sounded louder, weightier.

"-fucking – oh, hi, Garrus," Sidonis's voice said from behind him. "I see you're still alive. Well done."

Melenis walked past, carrying a chair. One of his arms had doubled in length to facilitate it; he was holding the very top, but was somehow keeping it absolutely straight with only one arm. That would have been remarkable enough had it just been the large chair, but it also happened to have Sidonis handcuffed to it.

"Sidonis," Garrus said, nodding in greeting. "Same to you."

"Ten grand says I live longer," Sidonis said, as Melenis lowered his chair to the floor beside Garrus's own.

"And if we survive this?"

"Well," Sidonis said, grinning, "one of us might just have to collect."

"I'll shoot you at the same time if you don't shut up," Erash said brusquely. "Now, I want to know how the hell you two got this ship."

"Story's simple," Sidonis said. "There's a ship. Someone has the codes. Other people know. Cue long chain of torture and gunpoint extraction, ending with us. That's all there is to it."

"You know, I just realised we've only been on this damn planet for about an hour," Garrus said. "This is ridiculous. We went here specifically because nobody would be able to find us." He glared at Sidonis. "This is probably your fault somehow."

"Oh, yeah, because _I'm_ the one who's supposed to predict giant fucking volus-bots," Sidonis said sourly. "I told you you were bad luck."

"And I agreed. How _did_ you find us, out of interest?"

"Those orbital rings," Erash said, with not a hint of smugness, "may not be as anonymous and secure as they advertise themselves to be."

"Well, that was money well spent," Sidonis said. "Wait, would you have found us if we hadn't gone to the rings?"

"Eventually. That ship's very difficult to hide. It would have taken longer than it did, though."

"Remind me never to listen to you again, Garrus," Sidonis said dejectedly.

"I have run a basic background trace on both," Melenis said suddenly. "There is no data on Sidonis that can be uncovered without an information specialist. However, Vakarian's background suggests ties to Deus may not be strong. If they exist."

_Ah. Do I detect a note of doubt there, my spring-loaded friend?_

"What?" Erash snapped. "What do you mean?"

"We know Deus does not have a presence outside the Terminus Systems, yet Vakarian served with C-Sec and the pan-species task force against the geth until five months ago. That is not sufficient time for him to have worked his way into Deus's inner circle, and he does not appear to have worked for him beforehand."

"Don't I? Oh, that's good," Garrus said. "Well, no harm done, so if you could just release-"

"You're saying they might be... telling the truth?" Erash said slowly, with an expression even non-salarians could recognise as mounting worry.

"It appears to at least be a significant possibility," Melenis said.

"This is bullshit!" Erash exploded. "We _know_ that ship can't have got off Omega without Deus's say-so!"

"Yet certain signs point to the influence of a third party. The broadcast of the ship's specifications. The chaos on Omega. The destruction of Vult. And now this."

"Wait, what's this about Vult?" Sidonis said. "What does-"

"Forget that," Garrus cut in. "Who the hell is Deus and _what's going on?_"

"No, shut up," Erash said, and stalked over to Sidonis, staring down at him suspiciously.

"Am I in trouble, sir?" Sidonis said sarcastically. "A bigger boy told me to do it."

"What do you know about Vult?" the salarian said.

"There's not much left to know, really. We really did a number on them."

"_You?_ You two took down Vult?"

"Us two?" Sidonis gave a short bark of laughter. "Like this asshole could do something like that."

"You know, I saved the galaxy once," Garrus said. "Why don't I get any respect for that? It's a nice galaxy."

"Who destroyed Vult, Sidonis?" Erash asked, with a dangerous-looking glint in his eye.

"Your mother," Sidonis said cheerfully. "See, she tried to get through a door, and – well, the structure just couldn't take it-"

In the blink of an eye, Erash's leg snapped up and caught Sidonis sweetly in the middle of his face. His head flicked back as the sound echoed around the room, then lolled forwards, blue blood dripping steadily into his lap. There was a silence that seemed to last a lot longer than it did, broken by short, wheezing laughter.

"Ha. Ha ha. Touched a fucking nerve right there, didn't I, fish-boy?" Sidonis said, lifting his head again. Blood was dribbling down his chin, but he was still smiling, smug and pained at the same time. "Why does that make you snap when you took all the other shit in your stride? Mommy issues, huh?"

Snarling, Erash drew his pistol and crashed it across Sidonis's face, sending a small, warm shower of blood droplets over Garrus. Sidonis spat out blood and laughed, this time long and loud, as Erash stood in front of him, breathing heavily. _Creepy, creepy, creepy. Then again, I don't want to say anything about it. He'll probably hit me. Ah, if only I were a masochist. It would make my life so much more pleasurable._

"Tell me who destroyed Vult," Erash said, and Garrus could easily, _easily_ hear the tone wobbling millimetres above the threshold of violence.

"You want to know? Fine," Sidonis said, breathing hard. At least he'd stopped laughing. "I'm a dead man anyway. I helped bring Vult down from the inside, me and nine others. They're all dead. Want to complete the set?"

"From the inside- you worked for Vult?"

"For a time."

"And you said you'd never heard of Deus."

"I hadn't," Sidonis snapped.

"Bullshit," Erash said flatly. "Deus runs Vult. He named it after himself, for fuck's sake!"

Garrus's blood ran as cold as ice.

"What?" Sidonis said. When Garrus looked around at him, his face was frozen into a grimace of horrified realisation.

_Been there._

"Deus Vult," Melenis said. "A phrase in the Latin language, a human dead tongue. 'God wills'."

"Fuck," Sidonis said. "_Fuck!_" He twisted round towards Garrus, ashen. "Garrus, I didn't know, they never... we didn't... I don't even know who he is!"

_Dammit. It's all connected. The ship. Vult. Deus. These two. Sidonis._

_Me._

_OK, think, think. Sidonis doesn't know Deus runs Vult, I know that for sure. He's definitely not lying. That means that it's an outside job – and the way they talk, Deus isn't dead. Deus had the codes at one point or another, and he took the ship to Omega. These two say they represent someone else who wants the codes – and they say he rightfully owns them. Does that mean he built the ship? How did someone else get the codes? What part did Vult play in all this?_

_Every damn time I go somewhere, crap like this happens. I hate my life._

"Garrus..." Sidonis said, almost pleading. Blood was still trickling from the corner of his mouth, glinting in the white glow of the light fixtures. "You've got to-"

"It's OK," Garrus told him. "Cool it. I believe you."

"Erash," Melenis said. "We must assume they are not in league with Deus for the moment."

"What the hell have we got ourselves mixed up in now?" Erash said wearily. "This is ridiculous. If these clowns aren't with him, who the fuck else is in play here?"

"_Nobody!_" Garrus half-shouted. "We're independent! We don't know who Deus is! We don't know who you work for! I have _no idea_ what's going on, and I've been beaten up and kidnapped – _twice –_ because I'm trying to save a few billion lives, and everybody keeps dropping names that I don't know anything about, and my head hurts and I'm _pissed off!_"

"...what he said," Sidonis muttered into the ensuing silence.

"We need to tell Sensat what's happening," Erash said to Melenis. "This is... I don't know what this is. Are you sure we can't just kill them and have him break into the system himself?"

"The codes cannot be reproduced," Melenis said. "His intent was to prevent it from being possible to steal."

Erash laughed bitterly. "Oh, yeah. Because that went so well for him. What a mess."

"I suggest we return to him for the moment. We need to-"

The volus suddenly stopped speaking mid-sentence.

"What now?" Erash said. "Mel?"

"Vakarian is receiving a transmission to his earpiece," Melenis said. "It is unencrypted. I am holding it for the moment."

_Vunas?_

"Let it through," Erash said, after a moment's thought. "Patch me in. Vakarian, react normally or you die. Got it?"

"What was the second part again?" Garrus said acidly.

Erash regarded him coldly for a second, then nodded to Melenis. "Put it through."

"-rus? You there?" a female voice said on the other end of the line. _Vunas. I thought so._

_Then again, that might just be because I don't know anyone else who would actually call me._

"Vunas? I'm here," he said. "Sorry about that. Sidonis, uh, was... distracting me."

_God, that sounds lame._

"_Running trace,_" Melenis said quietly to Erash.

"Distracting," Vunas said sceptically. "Are you sure you're just colleagues?"

"Wh- oh. That again," Garrus said. "Look, I'm telling you, we're not-"

"Don't let me interrupt your private time," Vunas said, her smile almost audible. Garrus couldn't help but notice Erash trying not to laugh in the corner of his eye. "After all, I-"

"What is it?" he snapped.

"Calm down, scales. No need to bite my head off. Just thought I'd let you know that I'm seeing some interesting traffic about this ship of yours."

"Go on," Garrus said cautiously. Melenis and Erash were watching him like hawks. Sidonis was staring at them in confusion, only getting one side of the conversation.

"OK, so," Vunas said, "it's like this. There's a whole lot of residual traffic from when everyone was talking about the ship, and that's carrying over to an extent – it's still big stuff on some of the newsnets that'll run any kind of story they can think of, but it never really hit the Citadel nets hard. Most people said it was a fake, some kind of hoax or scam. Since it was Omega, you can't blame them, I guess, but what's important is the trends. The ship is confirmed destroyed according to damn near every source I've traced, which is good for you. That means that nobody is looking for it except for people who know it survived – and _that_ means that any moderately skilled net-diver can trace the data currents right back to the source."

"And are you a moderately skilled net-diver?" Garrus asked.

"Baby, I'm the best. That's why you came to me."

"Uh, not really, but carry on."

"Wow, you really know how to make a girl feel special," Vunas drawled. "Well – and bear in mind this is only preliminary stuff – you'll want to start with the Emendus family and their corporate affiliates."

"The Emendus family?"

"Yep. I still have a couple of quantum hardspikes from the feednet I managed to flashport into their mainframe a few months ago-"

"Uh, I have no idea what you just said," Garrus said. "And I'm usually pretty good with this stuff."

Vunas sighed. "OK, you know that part of quantum theory that allows one vibrating particle to influence another, no matter where it is? It's kind of been pushed out in terms of practical applicability by eezo, but it's still got its uses. Basically, I have a few ultradense packets of them floating around in a bunch of important people's computers. Well, me and every other feeder in Valac."

"And that lets you take information straight out of the computers?"

"Yes and no. I don't really have much control over what info they take, just over their general position inside the system architecture – and even that's a bitch to maintain. Every system has hundreds milling around inside, usually only from the best divers. All the amateurs get weeded out by security picobots. The upshot is that I can take a tiny sample of the data constantly, and with that – and one hell of a lot of skill, let me tell you – I can build up a picture of the coms they're running. Works best when you have some kind of focus, like your ship. And guess who's been chattering about it?"

"The Emendus family."

"Ten out of ten for short-term memory. Now, these boys are pretty new in town. Not even a family in the biological sense, but not many of them are these days. They've been around a couple of years, but they have big-time funding from a couple of major players – Triumphans, Kovukus Tech, Eaisa. They're nouveau-riche, but round these parts that's the best kind of riche. I'm only in the external systems, away from the really tasty stuff. That'll take time. But they have a lot more traffic about your little doomsday device than any other organisation I can trace, and the difference is too much to be coincidence. There's nothing incriminating – incriminating, hah. Nothing _concrete_, I should say, and what I do have ain't complete... but it's a lead. Might be that these fellas know a little something that you'll be wanting to beat out of them."

"I... that's, that's great, Vunas," Garrus said. "That's incredible. You're incredible."

"I'm also blue, if we're playing 'state the obvious'. I'll keep digging, but you have enough to make a start. You want my advice? Abduct someone in the family and torture information out of them. Usually works."

"You'd be surprised how often that completely fails," Garrus said, and winked at Erash. The salarian didn't react.

"Yeah? Well, I'm a high-tech girl. I'll leave the heavy lifting to you big strong men. Tell Sidonis he's an idiot for me."

The call disappeared in a short hiss of static in his ear. Then, silence.

"So, anyone want to tell me what the fuck that was about?" Sidonis said.

"Vunas Deniaya. An independent information feeder," Melenis said. "She is not affiliated with any group. Furthermore, her lodgings and employment record suggest there are no clandestine links in existence."

"And the Emendus family? This is the first I've heard that they even knew about the ship," Erash said. "Do we believe her?"

"We must for the moment," Melenis said. "This warrants further investigation. However, I believe that this turn of events indicates they do not work with Deus."

"They went to her... you're right, damn it. They're not with him," Erash said quietly. He rubbed a hand down his face, closing his eyes. "God _damn_ it. Deus wouldn't use idiots like this."

"Hey," Sidonis said indignantly.

"It appears so," Melenis said. "This is a difficult situation."

"What's going on?" Erash moaned. "What's Deus doing? Sensat never said anything about crap like this!"

"I don't suppose that means you can let us go, does it?" Garrus said, without much hope.

"Hell no," Erash said, rounding on him with a sudden anger in his eyes. "This was meant to be easy! Do you _know_ how much you've just fucked up our lives?"

"You attacked and kidnapped us," Sidonis pointed out.

"Because you have the codes to the ship! Just hand them over and you can go! I don't give a shit about you or what you do, we just need those goddamn _codes!_"

"Patience," Melenis said. "We are not short of time."

"I know, I know, but... _fuck! _We're not anywhere near as in control of this as we thought we were. How the hell did Deus manage to lose those codes? Who's this third party?"

"Is there one?" Garrus said. "I mean, there's us, obviously, but we're alone and incompetent. Isn't it possible that this wasn't planned by anyone?"

"A pertinent question," Melenis said, almost thoughtfully. "Consider our evidence. To understand the situation, we must trace the course of events, beginning from Sensat's split with Deus. The codes were in the possession of Deus. This much is confirmed. The ship was on Omega. For reasons we do not yet know, the codes left his possession. We must assume this was due to him entrusting them to a lieutenant so that the ship could be moved or used; the only other possibility is that the codes were taken from Deus himself."

"Yeah, as if," Erash said. "So he gave his lackey the codes for some reason. What then?"

"At some point, the person bearing the codes lost them. There are numerous possibilities, but the most likely is that they were taken."

"Taken from Deus's most fanatical guys? Like they'd give them up."

"Pain and the fear of death are powerful motivators," the volus said simply. "It is at least conceivable that this is what occurred, is it not?"

"Conceivable isn't plausible, though."

"I remind you that our mission hinged on exploiting exactly that to extract the codes."

"True enough. OK, let's say this is what happened," Erash said reluctantly. "Then...

"Then commenced a series of similar happenings: the codes passed from person to person over several days, before finally arriving with Vakarian. At this point, the ship left Omega and travelled to Deinech, where it was refitted in the orbital shipyards. It landed at Valac, at which point we immediately entered the fray. We are now here."

"But that doesn't explain the broadcast of the ship's specs," Garrus ventured.

"No. It does not. This is the most perplexing event," Melenis said. "We can only speculate. However, it seems an ill-advised tactic to announce the existence of an extremely valuable ship that can be claimed on Omega. Furthermore, that broadcast could only have been made by someone with knowledge of the ship's capabilities, which leaves a very small number of living candidates: Sensat, who we can safely discount-"

"Sorry, who's Sensat?" Garrus said.

"Our boss," Erash said. "The original designer of the ship and the technology used in it."

"Right." _Was it really that simple to find out who built it? We need to put a stop to him, at any cost. But if he designed it, who're the Emendus family? Is he part of it?_

"Deus is the other obvious possibility," Melenis continued, "and perhaps the most likely to do it, even if the reasons remain unclear. But we know that the codes would have been necessary, because the broadcast unquestionably came from the ship. Therefore, the only truly plausible option must be-"

"Someone with the codes," Erash finished. "So at some point, someone had the codes and nobody else knew that they had them or even that the ship existed. Instead of just taking the ship, they let everyone in the Systems know it was there. Then, they lost the codes. Every two-bit merc on Omega surrounds that ship like flies to shit, and things are just about ready to explode. People stay away from the ship even if they have the codes because it's too hot. The codes keep changing hands until they reach our metallic friend here."

"Sounds about right," Sidonis said thoughtfully.

"Yet this hypothesis relies on the code-bearer acting against their own interests, or so it seems," Melenis said. "It is not a perfect answer. However, I cannot see a more likely one – assuming, of course, that Vakarian and Sidonis are indeed independent."

"He was with Vult, though," Erash said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at Sidonis. "That ties him to Deus, whether or not he claims he didn't know the connection."

"He's also in the fucking room, man," Sidonis said indignantly. "He doesn't appreciate being talked about in the third person all the time."

"He can also shut the hell up," Erash said, without turning round.

"However, he claims to have destroyed Vult – the timing of which is indeed suspect. It occurred the day before the broadcast was made."

"Come on! I never had those codes! I couldn't have been involved! It was dumb luck!" Sidonis said, straining forwards as far as he could. "Can't you check, or something? Go through my omnitool?"

Erash turned back to him, looking thoughtful. "Can you?" he said to Melenis.

"No. The code package does not leave any data trail."

"Well, that's just fucking perfect, isn't it?" Sidonis said. "So, basically, there's absolutely no way for us to prove we're just in this by chance, is there?"

"That's just the problem," Garrus said heavily. "From what they know, all the evidence points either to me being the one who made the broadcast or to whoever actually did being dead."

"It doesn't even matter," Erash said. "None of this matters to what we're meant to be doing. Sensat can worry about this shit, or he can pay us to do it. I'm not doing it free of charge." He jabbed a long finger at Garrus's face. "Either you give us the codes now, or we move on to torture. I don't like torture. Mel doesn't like torture. I really doubt you do. But that's the only way forward for us. Sorry."

He sounded genuinely apologetic, Garrus had to give him that. Whether it _was_ genuine or not, well, that was another question entirely.

"Can I sit out of the whole torture thing?" Sidonis said. "Because, you know, I don't actually have anything you want-"

"Yes, but I don't like you."

"Ah. Fair point," Sidonis conceded.

"So, back to square one," Garrus said, trying to ignore the snakes that seemed to be wriggling through his stomach. "We don't work for Deus, it's all coincidence, et cetera, et cetera. Are you at least going to tell us who Deus is? What he wants?"

"We do not know his ultimate goals," Melenis said. "Power and money seem the most likely. They often are."

"And as for who he is," Erash said, "well, we're not too sure there either. Sensat doesn't tell us everything. Just what we need to know."

"And that doesn't include who your enemy is?" Sidonis said incredulously. "Yeah, that's a world-beating strategy right there."

"You don't argue with Sensat. The boss is always right."

"If your boss is creating superweapons that are capable of killing billions of innocent people on any planet he likes," Garrus said coldly, "maybe you should rethink your definition of 'right'. I will not hand over the only set of codes to a weapon like that to the maniac who built it. It's an abomination, and I'll die preventing it from being used if I have to."

_Ooh, that sounded good. A defiant last stand for the brave, selfless hero. Except I don't really have a lot of alternatives, because I don't believe for a second that they'll just let us go when we know as much as we do. Even without the codes, there's a hell of a lot we could screw up for them. We know names, we know the ship's still intact – we know enough for there to be a chance that whatever they're trying to do will fail._

_No matter how this goes down, I won't see another day._

"Well, that doesn't put me in a difficult position or anything," Sidonis muttered. "I never should have rescued you in the first place."

"Hey, that extended your life by about two weeks," Garrus said. "Admittedly, they weren't exactly _good_ weeks, what with all the grieving and boredom and serious injuries, but still."

"I still plan to outlive you, you know. While you're dying I'll be still alive, and then I'll laugh. And _then_ die."

"Good for you," Garrus said vaguely.

"Admirable goal, I guess," Erash said. "It's a shame you're not raving about how you want to destroy the galaxy or something. That would make it easier. But my hands are tied."

Garrus smiled thinly. "I can relate."

"Torture may not be necessary," Melenis said. "It remains a possibility that Sensat could break into the ship's programming. He left no back door, but his knowledge of its architecture means he may be able to bypass the protection with enough time if we are able to prevent its auto-destruct protocol from activating when it senses the threat."

"That's a lot of conditionals there," Erash said. "We know the codes work. We don't know that will. How much time is 'enough', anyway?"

"...most likely, several months," Melenis admitted.

"You could try calling Sensat and proposing that."

"I fear such an effort may prove futile."

"You know, you really have a gift for understatement, Mel," Erash said with a mirthless smile. "Go and get some, ah, equipment, would you? We might as well make a start."

_Oh joy_.

The volus nodded, and began to walk towards the door. Just before the threshold, he stopped dead.

"Mel?" Erash said uncertainly. "What's-"

"There is a large air-vehicle approaching the building. I... ran a trace on the call from the information feeder," Melenis said slowly, and for the first time, Garrus could hear a trace of real emotion in the voice. It was the unmistakeable ring of horrified, belated understanding.

_This... is not good._

"Yeah. So?"

"I used Sensat's software to do so... and I neglected to encrypt my trace. If the unique signature of the software were being watched for-"

"We could be traced," Erash finished, the same horror etched across his face. "Can you confirm it? _Can you conf-_"

Mid-sentence, a loud, heavy, dull explosion sounded, somewhere off to Garrus's right. It was muffled and distant, but still loud enough to make his ears ring for a couple of seconds and make his headache about twice as bad. More ominously, it was powerful enough to send a tremor racing through the floor beneath his feet with a low rumble. The lights flickered for a second, then came back on to full power as Erash stumbled against the wall.

_Oh, this is so not good._

_Wait, maybe it is._

"Breach in the east face," Melenis said, with psychotic calm returning to his voice. "They will come down the hallway. Free them. Arm yourselves. Get to the car. They will shoot to kill."

"_FUCK!_" Erash exploded. "You idiot! You led him right-"

Melenis was already sprinting out of the room, and even as he disappeared from view Garrus could hear the telltale hum of the machinery beneath the suit sliding into action.

_Well, on the one hand, he's not planning on torturing us any more, which is nice. On the other, we're still in pretty immediate danger, but that's par for the course these days. Probably a net positive, overall, but not by much. Still, I'll take what I can get._

"Oh yeah, just go," Erash spat, and drew his pistol. "Shit!"

"Get us out of these chairs," Garrus said, amazed at the calm in his own voice. "They want to destroy the codes. We need you. You need us."

"I need _you_," Erash said, moving around behind him. "Not your friend."

"Hey! What the fuck do you mean, not me?" Sidonis said, struggling furiously. "Hey! HEY!"

There was a click, and the handcuffs fell away from one of his wrists. No sooner had he brought his hands around from behind his back, Erash seized them and locked the loose cuff back onto his wrist, so that his hands were chained in front of him.

"What the hell-"

"I'm not stupid," Erash said. "What's to stop you from attacking me?"

_Can't complain there. I'd have done exactly the same thing._

Garrus got up, muscles burning after so long without moving. Away to his right, the unmistakeable snapping noise of gunfire had started up, along with a few echoing shouts. They seemed to be getting closer.

"You'd better not have meant that, fish-boy!" Sidonis said. "Let me go!"

Garrus turned to Erash, who was eyeing the door longingly.

"Either we both live," he said, "or we both die. Free him."

"Fuck it, OK, OK! We don't have _time_-" Erash said, and knelt behind Sidonis to open his restraints. Sidonis, with uncharacteristic sense, put his hands together to be cuffed again._Maybe there's hope for the kid, eh?_

"We need guns," Garrus said urgently, as Sidonis stood, stretching.

"Agreed," Erash said. "This way."

He turned on his heel and ran for the door, and Garrus followed. They emerged into a corridor done in the same simple style as the room, plain and well-lit. When he looked in the direction of the commotion, all he could see was a turn in the hallway, as blank as the rest, but the crack of the guns and those shouts were louder still. The same sight greeted him in the other direction.

In front of them, two metres across the corridor, was another door, the same grey rectangle that they'd just come through. Down each side of the hall, there were a few more, spaced at irregular intervals. Erash set off down away from the gunfire, which struck Garrus as a wise move. Three doors down, he skidded to a halt and rammed a hand into the controls. Nothing happened. Erash uttered some salarian curse even the translation matrix couldn't figure out and tried again. Garrus realised that this was the only door that had those sort of controls on it, and briefly wondered why before the door slid aside to answer his question for him.

There were guns. Lots of guns. There were whole racks of lean, menacing assault rifles, a dozen blocky automatic shotguns hanging from the wall, rifles and pistols and big, heavy, unidentifiable slabs of dangerous-looking metal were strewn across worktables, and what looked oddly like a rack of swords was attached to one wall. There was barely an inch of the room that didn't contain something capable of blowing someone's head into more pieces than seemed necessary.

_I suddenly feel so inadequate._

"...fuck," Sidonis said appreciatively.

Erash tossed his pistol aside like it was a fifty-cred Saturday night special and grabbed an assault rifle from a table, bringing it up to check it. It was long, sleek, thin and looked deadly as all hell. Garrus didn't recognise the make, and that meant a lot. _Custom. Specially built. Hell, the only guns I can identify here are a few of the pistols and that one shotgun, but even they're modded! There must be about fifty million creds' worth of firepower here... just who the hell are these two working for?_

The firefight was getting closer still, by the sound of it; as Erash took a pair of pistols from a worktop, Garrus stuck his head out of the door in time to catch sight of a few bright energy bolts fizzle and crackle against the wall of the corridor back in the other direction.

His head snapped around at the sound of his name just in time for him to catch the pistol Erash had thrown at him by the muzzle, fumbling awkwardly with his cuffed hands. It was lighter than it looked, but somehow he didn't doubt that it was more powerful than anything he'd held in about five months.

… _I suddenly feel even more inadequate._

"OK, boys and girls," Erash said, handing a similar pistol to Sidonis, "here are the rules. The pistols are programmed not to fire if their VI thinks your intention might be to shoot me, so don't try it."

Sidonis tried it. Nothing happened.

"Just checking," he said, shrugging.

"Yes, I guess I should have expected that," Erash said drily, and headed for the door. "Also, I'm capable of remotely overloading the thermal clips and blowing your hands to a fine paste. Just a heads-up."

"Generous," Garrus commented, and followed. The end of the corridor was smoking from all the shots fired against the wall, and the sounds of gunfire had risen to a storm. There had to be at least ten guns active by Garrus's reckoning, quite possibly more. _If anyone can handle that, though, my money's on the gigavolus._

They ran down the hallway in the opposite direction, Erash leading the way, and rounded the corner at the end into another stretch of corridor, a good forty metres long and lined with the same doors as the last one. _This place is big... did Melenis say it was a whole building? In Valac? That's serious, serious money._

At the end of the hallway was a full-sized steel shutter that ran across the width of it. It looked suitably final as they ran towards it with the sounds of gunfire and explosions fading behind them, but when they'd gone barely three metres towards it, Erash skidded to a halt. Garrus tried to follow suit and use his arms to keep his balance, forgetting they were chained together. He might have stayed upright if Sidonis hadn't made the same mistake.

"-again, Mel, I'm not hearing you right-" Erash said urgently into his communicator. "Mel?"

"What the fuck now?" Sidonis griped, as he hauled himself off Garrus.

"Don't ask me," Garrus said, and stooped to grab the pistol he'd dropped. "Isn't-"

"DOWN!" Erash bellowed, sounding more krogan than salarian, and dropped to the floor. Garrus's training and instincts took over and performed a controlled demolition on his knees before he had time to think, and as he hit the ground again something exploded. He couldn't tell what, exactly, because his vision seemed to have been replaced by a large purple blotch and his hearing with a high-pitched whine. It was an experience rather like the time a couple of friends had roped him into going to a krogan metal gig in the Wards.

He felt a hand grab him by the collar of his suit and drag him upwards, and he recovered in time to dimly catch sight of shapeless figures moving through a cloud of smoke, which was pulsing like a thundercloud in a rave club. Erash was firing away with his pistol, making a vaguely audible _phut_ sound through the ringing in his ears. Automatically, he brought his own up and opened fire – _incredible design on this thing, the recoil feels like a pellet gun – _as energy bolts started to crackle around his ears.

"Get back!" Erash was shouting, although it didn't sound like shouting even with his wrinkled brown mouth about ten centimetres from Garrus's ear. He found himself pushing himself back towards the corner with his legs as his vision slowly cleared and kept firing through the smoke, taking targets wherever he could. He thought he saw one drop, but for all he knew it could have been a trick of the light, and before he knew it he was back at the corner, with Erash already behind him and Sidonis making a pass on the outside. Erash grabbed his arm with one surprisingly strong hand and forcibly dragged him into cover, but not before a few of the shots had found their target. The first three burst apart against his shield, but the fourth tore through it and smashed into his chest, driving the air out of him and knocking him on his ass.

It felt like he'd been punched by a krogan, but not much worse. A shot from a pistol might have penetrated from that distance, but assault rifle rounds weren't going to get through the heavy protection. _I think._

"What the fuck was that?" Sidonis called over the cacophony. Garrus's ears still felt like someone had set off a grenade in them, but he could still hear the sound of the firefight at the other end of the building slowly getting closer.

"The landing pad!" Erash said, and fired a few rounds blind around the corner before popping the clip.

"Tell me the car wasn't through there," Garrus said, without much hope.

"Sure, it wasn't," Erash snapped. "Hell, I'm also the goddess Minit."

Garrus leaned over and stuck his head around the corner. The smoke was clearing enough for him to pick out a target easily enough, but they were smart; there were about ten or twelve of them laying down heavy fire, enough to cook the wall to his left and definitely enough to convince him to take his head back as fast as possible. A quarter of a second later, a bright blue streak of raw power hummed through the space where his forehead has been and put another miniature molten crater in the wall.

"Uh, I don't think we go that way," he said. _I could swear that singed my fringe. I really can't afford to lose that._

"Well, this is fun," Sidonis said brightly. "Any good ideas?"

"Mel? You there?" Erash said. "Melenis! Listen, they destroyed the goddamn car! We're going to Plan B!"

"...Plan B? What's that?" Sidonis said.

The salarian shrugged expansively. "Fucked if I know. The same as every other Plan B: kill people until the problem goes away." He clicked another thermal clip into his pistol and opened fire again, totally blind. "Let's have a little fun."

"Ah," Garrus said. "_That_ kind of Plan B."

_I so don't see this going well._


	12. Divine Intervention: Violence

******DIVINE INTERVENTION**

**FIVE: VIOLENCE**

* * *

"Out," Garrus said, as his freshly-emptied thermal clip fell to the floor. He pulled the pistol back from around the corner and Erash grabbed it out of his hands, dropping his own off in return. Over the last minute, they'd organically come to a system of reloading where they constantly juggled the pistols between them, Erash slotting in fresh clips as fast as they wore them out. It was surprisingly functional, but there was no way it was going to outlast the wave of troops blasting merrily away down the corridor..

"Eight left," Erash said through gritted teeth, and replaced the clip. He leaned over Garrus's shoulder and squeezed off eight or nine rounds in quick succession down the corridor before dropping back as the bolts started to track towards his exposed head. Garrus listened for the telltale sound of either a scream or a body hitting the floor, but it would have been impossible to hear over the constant electric rattle of gunfire. He was sure they'd got at least two of them, but there were too many to count even through the smoke that was still billowing through the other end of the hallway.

"Out," Sidonis called from behind him.

"Seven!"

"We can't sustain this position!" Garrus said, and fired a few blind rounds. He was crouched down at the corner, a smoking wall to his left and a fire-zone full of gun-wielding bad guys to his right, with Sidonis and Erash constantly swapping positions over his shoulder depending on who had a functioning gun at the time. _I hate fighting in empty corridors. First rule of defence: find as many waist-high crates and walls as you can, and hide behind them. What kind of firefight doesn't have waist-high walls?_

"Agreed," Erash said, having to shout to make himself heard over the noise. He brought one hand up to his ear, firing a few shots down the corridor one-handed. "Mel! Situation!"

"Patch us in, you idiot!" Sidonis said. "We need to hear!"

"Shut it! Mel, say again?"

Erash flicked a couple of buttons on his omnitool and brought his hand back up, and suddenly Garrus's earpiece crackled into life.

"-dead, but still at least ten left, and my shields are failing fast," Melenis's manically calm voice said in his ear.

Garrus shot a glance over his shoulder past Sidonis and Erash, towards the other end of the corridor fifty metres behind him, but it was still mercifully devoid of people trying to kill him. There were still a few bolts flying across and splashing against the wall, but fewer than there had been, and they didn't sound like they were coming closer. _Not that I can really hear them, of course._

"We're running out of ammo, faster," Erash said urgently. "We have to pull back."

"We cannot allow them to pin us down," Melenis replied. "If we retreat we will be trapped."

"Better than killed!"

"We can fortify, we can wear them down-" Garrus started.

"These will be just the first wave," Melenis said. "Deus is scrambling troops. More will be here soon. We must escape quickly."

"So we get to the armoury, get some big-ass guns and fuck their day up," Sidonis said. "What's the problem?"

Erash and Garrus looked at each other for a second, then Erash shrugged.

"Mel, any better ideas?" he said.

"...not as of this moment," Melenis conceded.

"And you called me an idiot," Sidonis said, with as much smugness as someone in his situation could muster.

"Well," Garrus said, "you kind of are."

"OK, we move on three," Erash said. "Mel, can you break cover?"

"With some difficulty, but yes."

"Good," the salarian said, then froze. Garrus did the same thing, not out of conscious thought but out of the same combat instincts he'd had drilled into him since the day he'd first walked into boot camp, because what he'd heard, even over the storm of noise around him, met his ears like a rapier and pierced straight through to the movement centres of his brain. He hadn't seen it; it had been out in the nexus of the two corridors while he'd been looking back the other way, but the flash of dull, blank panic in Sidonis's eyes would have been more than enough even if he hadn't heard the instantly recognisable, unmistakeable _clink_ of the grenade hitting the floor.

_Three._

"MOVE!" he heard himself bellowing even as he did, sprinting down the hallway after Erash with Sidonis at his shoulder for what seemed like an age, like he was wading through treacle while adrenaline sang in his ears, and then the vast, warm fist of the fireball punched him in the back and swatted him five metres through the air.

He landed hard on Erash, and heard all four of their lungs lose their air in a synchronised _whump _as Sidonis arced gracefully over them to land in a heap of tangled limbs. The pain was there, but he forced himself to ignore it and stumble awkwardly to his feet, pushing himself off the salarian with cuffed hands, his pistol forgotten, jumping over Sidonis as he stirred and running like hell. That was military training, too; his normal reaction would have been to drag them up with him, but the cold, calculating brain of a soldier told him to save his own skin whether or not he wanted to.

Then there was another horribly familiar noise in front of him, and he looked up to see the origin of the heavy metallic pounding power around the corner at the other end of the corridor at terrifying speed, leaning over so much to take the bend that it would have been comical if it hadn't happened to be Melenis.

He brought one metre-long arm up, holding what looked to be a heavy assault rifle as if it was a pistol, and for a third of a heartbeat Garrus was sure he was going to gun him down, but the spray of fire erupted over his shoulder with a rattle and he realised he was covering them from the inevitable pursuers.

Or possibly murdering Sidonis and Erash. That didn't seem likely.

As Garrus approached the door into the armoury, Melenis had somehow already got there despite facing a longer distance in about half the time, and before he knew it the door was wrenched open and the room gaping invitingly, and he hurled himself through as Melenis switched his fire to his own pursuers coming up behind him. He skidded to a halt and braced against a table of shotguns just as Erash and Sidonis dived through the door together, the salarian keeping his feet and Sidonis sprawling flat on his face as Melenis followed them, bringing the door shut with a sepulchral slam.

The sounds of gunfire abruptly vanished, and there was a moment of silence.

"You know," Sidonis said thoughtfully, picking himself up off the floor for the second time in twenty seconds, "we're kind of lucky they didn't think to do that earlier."

"Can they get through?" Garrus said urgently, breathing heavily. As if in answer, a muffled explosion sounded outside the door, forced down to a quiet boom by the heavy metal barrier, and although the room shook for a second the door stood firm.

"This room is highly fortified," Melenis said. "They will only be able to enter by hacking the lock, and with Sensat's design in place we have at least one hundred seconds. That assumes they are intelligent enough not try to blow the door again."

Another low, thick blast rumbled the floor from outside. Nothing happened.

"Perhaps that is an unwarranted assumption," Melenis mused.

"Guns," Erash said, and elbowed past Garrus to the table of heavy weapons with a hungry glint in his eye. "Arm up, boys."

"Hate to tell you this," Garrus said, "but I can't really operate anything more than a pistol in handcuffs."

"Release them," Melenis said immediately.

Erash whirled around. "Are you insane?"

"They will not kill us," Melenis said. "Even if they wanted to. Furthermore, their numbers now require more than the two of us can muster to escape. If you do _not_ release them, we will die."

"Oh, great," Erash said, and Garrus held his wrists out to him. "If we die, I'm gonna kill you, Mel."

Melenis didn't respond, but instead stalked over to the table and picked up what looked like a small artillery cannon in one hand. It took a second, but Garrus realised, as he rubbed the pain out of his wrists and Erash moved to free Sidonis, that it _was_. It was a modified Dakeon pulse-maser turret, meant to be mounted on frontline _tanks_. It was about a metre long, a quarter of that in each of the other two directions, and built roughly like a magnified brick. It had to weigh hundreds of kilogrammes, but the volus was holding it like a pistol. There had to be some kind of eezo manipulation going on inside that body of his just for him to carry it!

"Oh, I like this one," Sidonis said, as his own handcuffs fell away, and he went over to lift a long, bulbous flamethrower from the table almost reverentially. "Is this-"

"A customised variant on the Iridium OGTF-4, yeah," Erash said. "Be careful with that thing. You fire it anywhere where you don't have ten metres of space, you'll melt your testicles."

"Words to live by," Sidonis said solemnly. Garrus snorted and went to the table himself, casting a professional eye over the equipment. About a third of it was too big for him to use, but a lot of the rest looked like it could have blown up a small moon. He passed over a simple rocket launcher and a few laser-based beasts before something caught his eye.

"I don't even recognise that one," he said to Erash, who was plumping for a heavy-looking grenade launcher plated in menacing black durasteel.

"Which- ah. You wouldn't. Custom-built. I don't even have the physical strength for it," Erash said doubtfully, peering closely at the weapon. "You could try it, I guess. Word of warning: it's got a kick like, uh, someone who's really good at kicking things."

"That much?" Garrus murmured, and lifted it from the table. It was heavy as all hell, and he struggled with it until he managed to lift the strap over his shoulders, but even then it felt like it weighed a tonne. It was probably a few dozen kg at the very least, even with the inevitable eezo grav-manipulation weapons like this always employed, but his armour's internal power systems – those that were still working, at least – took some of the strain.

"Hell," he said appreciatively, testing its swing. Its long, contoured barrel was heavy, true, but it moved almost as easily as a hose in his hands. "What exactly can this thing do?"

"It fires 200-credit custom-tooled cartridges at 10,000 rounds per minute," Erash said, fighting and failing to keep traces of awe out of his voice.

"That's..." Garrus ran through some mental calculations, then ran through them again after the answer seemed too big to comprehend. It was the same the second time around. "It costs 400,000 credits to fire this gun for twelve seconds!"

He laughed delightedly, and powered up the gun. He could _feel_ it come alive, humming against his hip like some angry leviathan awakening.

"Sensat is going to flay us for losing this much shit," Erash said heavily. "There's about ten million creds of ammo in that thing alone."

"That's... three hundred seconds of fire?" Garrus said, his eyes wide.

"And they're gonna be good fucking seconds," Sidonis said, hefting his flamer. "We got a plan?"

"We head to the car again, but with more explosions," Erash said. "Caused by us, naturally."

"No," Melenis said slowly. He'd slung a vast leather strap over his hulking shoulders, which made the weapon he was holding look slightly less toy-like, but it still looked almost unreal held in just one of those huge hands. "No, they will bring more reinforcements in via the landing pad. They can only have one vehicle at the eastern breach at any given moment. It was not an intelligent move to attack from there initially. They were in a hurry, I suppose."

"So what are you suggesting?" Erash said suspiciously. "We go the other way? Then what? How do we get to the car?"

"We do not," Melenis said simply.

"Sorry, there's been a misunderstanding or something here," Erash said, after a short pause. "We're eighty metres up. We can't fly. We need a car!"

"Or another vehicle," Garrus pointed out.

"Precisely," Melenis said. "We can take their transport. It is likely that the car has been disabled, at any rate. There is no other way."

"Wow, there's a sentence to inspire confidence," Erash grumbled. "Fuck it, we'll do it. No time to argue."

"Wait, so we fight through however many guys, then steal their car – while more of them are arriving?" Sidonis said. "That doesn't seem... sane."

"Do you have a better suggestion?" Melenis said, and with his tone he could genuinely have been asking the question or delivering a withering put-down. It was impossible to tell.

"Hell no," Sidonis said cheerfully, and ignited the pilot light of his flamer. "Sanity is for the weak. Let's rock."

_There's something about him when he's got nothing left to lose... like he doesn't care whether he lives or dies. I wonder how much of that is bravado? I've done the same thing more times than I care to recall, but he's still just a kid. And Chirin affected him a lot more than he's letting on, I know that much. I just wonder... is he really in his right mind?_

His thoughts were interrupted by a chime from the direction of the door.

"The first layer of protection just fell," Melenis said. "They will be through within sixty seconds. We must move soon."

"Wait," Garrus said, "do they know this is an armoury?"

There was a pause as they considered the implications of that idea.

"No," Melenis said, and those burning bronze eyes seemed to gleam even brighter for a second. "No, I do not believe they do. They learned of the existence of this building minutes ago. They will not be expecting... this."

"Right," Erash said, "I'll bring up the rear with Sidonis. Vakarian, sweep the road. Mel can draw fire up front with you."

"Hey, why am I at the back?" Sidonis complained.

"Because you really, _really_ want to be moving away from the fires that thing sets," Erash told him.

"There will be two turns until the breach," Melenis said. "We will not be able to move quickly as a group. There are at least twenty left alive from my direction, and most likely as many in yours if not more."

"Cannon fodder, eh?" Garrus said, eyeing the vast turret the volus was cradling.

Melenis looked down, then glanced back up, and when he spoke there might just have been the faintest trace of amusement in his voice.

"Indeed."

There was another chime from the door, this one higher in pitch.

"They are almost through. We must go now," Melenis said, and moved for the door. Garrus went to keep up and almost tripped over the gargantuan weapon he was holding, but managed to stay upright. He heard Sidonis and Erash moving into place behind them courtesy of a couple of muffled curses, and let his finger wander down the the trigger. True to unreasonably expensive form, it was ergonomically sculpted to morph into the turian finger configuration. He was acutely aware that what he was holding was essentially worth more than he'd ever owned and been paid combined, and it felt equal parts terrifying and exhilarating. _Like everything I do._

"My shields are recharged to near their maximum capacity," Melenis said, one hand hovering over the handle of the door. "I will draw their fire. Sidonis, use the flamethrower to blind those behind us. We cannot allow them to hold us down."

"I plan to do a lot more than blind them," Sidonis said, with a mad grin plastered across his face.

"Very well. We move on three. One. Two. _Three-_"

Even as the last word registered in Garrus's ears and he tensed, Melenis was already flinging the door outwards. Several hundred kilogrammes of solid durasteel hurtled left at a blinding speed, and came to rest hard flat against the wall – except it didn't, there was something – _some__**one **__-_ keeping it from actually touching the wall. There was a bright burst of blue blood from behind the door that sprayed upwards onto the ceiling in a wide splatter, but by the time _that_ registered Garrus was already instinctively following Melenis's hulking shape out of the door, careful not to catch the gun on the frame. Melenis's left leg snapped up with astonishing speed and caught a helmeted turian in the chest as he stumbled away from the door in surprise – _he wasn't even looking at him –_ and sent him flying back towards the landing pad and into a group of armoured shapes, sending them sprawling, and then his massive gun roared in the other direction. Blue fire spat down the corridor as Garrus stumbled through the door after him, sending a hammering line of pulses streaming into the cluster of figures Garrus was vaguely aware of to his right before the flash of the gun nearly blinded him. Half a second later, he managed to bring the barrel of his own weapon up to bear, standing to the left of Melenis, and squeezed the trigger.

_Oh, wow._

The effect was unbelievable. His whole body seemed to vibrate as fast as the brilliant orange darts came tumbling from the barrel, but the recoil was no more than he'd have expected from a reasonably well-made automatic rifle. The fire rate was astronomical, and he could see the shots rifling away so fast that they seemed to blur into a single laser-like light. There were maybe eight targets in the corridor left standing, with about as many on the ground – it was hard to tell exactly how many because Melenis's first shot had left some splattered into innumerable pieces - but when that stream of light so much as touched the first, his entire torso disintegrated in a wave of blue gore and dark shards of armour. He strafed across even as the last few began to turn and run, and he cut two of them in half before obliterating another almost entirely. Three at the end of the corridor managed to vanish around the corner before he could get to them, and then Melenis's cannon screamed again and the last two were blasted apart faster than he could blink.

He'd been out of the room for under four seconds. Somewhere in there, Sidonis had emerged and opened up, and he was aware of a sudden warmth on the back of his head as screams of fire-induced agony echoed down the corridor from behind him – then three or four sharp hammer-blows of noise rattled the building as Erash's grenades detonated. He let his own fire come to a halt, and then all of sudden there was a deathly silence in the hallway, broken only by the sound of unintelligible shouting from around the corner up ahead and the faint crackle of flame behind him.

_I think that's what it feels like to be a battlecruiser. I just used almost a hundred grand's worth of ammunition and killed three people._

"Clear," Melenis said unnecessarily.

The hallway in front of them was a smoking wreck. The metal wall at the far end had melted away almost entirely under the barrage of their guns, leaving a red-hot opening to another room. The flooring was littered with body parts, shredded armour and viscera, all of it in a sea of dark blue blood.

_Turians. They're all turians. Some sort of turian-only merc group? Ex-Hierarchy?_

"I think I'm in love," Sidonis said dreamily. Garrus glanced over his shoulder to see what he'd wrought, and his eyes widened a little: the bodies there were mostly intact, but the grenades had blown a hole in one wall and left a cloud of smoke hanging over them. Most of the intact corpses were still burning from the incredible heat of the flamethrower – and, to his horror, even as he watched one of them began to raise an arm. The arm itself was still on fire, crackling away as brightly as the rest of his body, but he was somehow still alive. He let out a strangled, scraping moan of pure agony as he cooked inside his own armour before Sidonis lit up the corridor again in a roar of heat. By the time it died away, the body had stopped moving, and the flames on his armour danced higher still.

Garrus shivered despite the sudden warmth. _I hate using incendiaries. Nobody deserves to go that way._

_Well, not many people._

"Hardy little fucker," Sidonis commented. "Anyway, shall we?"

They moved down the corridor at something that was never more than a half-trot. It was all Garrus could manage, although he had no doubt Melenis could have surged ahead. Sidonis and Erash were walking backwards behind them, covering the remnants of the corridor, although nobody seemed to be coming through. Shouts were still echoing from the corridor ahead, and now he was able to make a few of them out.

"_-a fucking TANK!_"

"_-come in, come in, do you_-"

"_-wer and a bloody minigun-_"

"_-rce the breach, we need more, da-_"

"_-up now! Shields up!_"

"I believe we have made an impression," Melenis said, in an absolutely deadpan tone. Garrus glanced sharply up at him as his boots splashed in the blood. _That's not a sense of humour in there, is it?_

"Goddess, I think I stepped in somebody's brain," Erash's disgusted voice rang out behind them.

"Actually, I think that's a turian liver," Sidonis said.

"Oh, really? That's all right, then," Erash said absently, and kicked the organ away with a squelch. "Oh, they're going to have to glue you back together," he murmured, glancing down at the body whose innards it hailed from.

_In hell,_ Garrus thought.

The shouts grew louder as they approached the corner, and seemed to become more panicky at the same time. There was the patter of running feet, all getting nearer, as well as an electric hum in the air that Garrus instantly recognised as the sound of portable shields powering up. Normally, that would be an ominous sound to hear; it meant that your enemies were digging in, and that they probably had a much better position than you did. Today, it didn't really matter. It wasn't going to save them.

He felt oddly light-headed as they came to a halt just short of the turn, and mentally shook himself. _Watch it. Stay focused. Even if you're holding a gun that could probably take down a geth armature inside a second. How is it that these guys have one and we didn't on the Normandy? It would have made things a lot easier._

"They will be expecting us," Melenis said quietly. "We need all the firepower we can muster. Sidonis, stay on the rear. Erash, move to the front."

"Hey, why do I have to-" Sidonis began.

"Shut up and do it," Garrus hissed.

"OK, OK. I still think it's bullshit."

As Sidonis moved into position, still grumbling, Garrus caught a few words from the next corridor, this time spoken rather than shouted but still infused with the same sense of panic.

"-_an with them?_"

"_-recognise two-_"

"On three," Melenis said, ignoring them. "One. Two. Three."

They darted around the corner as one to see that the hallway had been transformed; what looked like a collection of octagonal sheets of purple-blue glass stood in front of them, reaching up just over a metre, but any soldier would immediately have recognised the translucent, shimmering surfaces as battlefield kinetic barrier technology. Behind them, through the odd rippled distortion, more dark figures could be made out, crouching with ominous-looking rifles in their hands. The setup was impressively deep for such a short time of preparation; Garrus could only assume they'd each had a portable shield generator with them, because they filled a solid twenty metres of hallway with gaps of barely a metre between them, just enough for the troops to fit in. It was a professional defensive formation, one that would normally have been enough to inspire immediate strategic retreat... _but things aren't exactly normal these days, are they? _There were a couple of bodies lying on the floor before the shields, presumably from Melenis's earlier battle; one had its neck at a sickeningly impossible angle, and the other looked like it had taken a cannonball to the chest.

The first shot from Melenis screeched through the air and splashed against the foremost shield wall and burst apart in a heavy spray of sparks, but the second smashed it into atoms and pulverised the man behind it in an explosion of fine blue paste. Garrus squeezed down on his own trigger again and felt the gun jerk into life beside his hip, and he directed the impossibly powerful stream of fire towards an unfortunate gunman who was emerging from cover to take a shot. It punched a hole the size of his head through his chest, and then slid down to burn away most of the rest of his upper body and disintegrate his shield as Erash's first grenade detonated. The shields had been arranged in rows of three, as many as the corridor could handle, and the last one left on the front row burst apart with a terrific bang in a thick wall of flame.

The corridor was instantly filled with a blinding mist of smoke that made it impossible to make out anything but the faintest outlines. That worked out entirely in their favour; while both sides had an equal disadvantage from the lack of line of sight – _although I wouldn't put it past Melenis to have some kind of smoke-penetrating sensors, god knows he's got everything else in there –_ the way their enemies had been forced to set up meant their fire could only come from the front row or else risk massive friendly fire. In theory, that meant a fair match of three on three, skewed towards the defenders as in every tactical situation. However, they were up against three assault rifles while packing the approximate firepower of a small battlecruiser.

Garrus fired blind. _Not really the type of gun you need to aim, I guess._ He swept the barrel back and forth slowly and methodically for ten seconds, wincing at the sheer amount of money he was blasting merrily away with. At least a dozen of Erash's grenades cracked and belched fire in the depths of the smoke and Melenis's maser fizzed away beside him, lighting the corridor up a sickly electric blue as the bolts punched through the fumes. The only sound he could make out was that of their guns roaring loud in his ears, all he could see the endless, acrid fog roiling from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, although he could make out a few bright flashes from within. Whether they were gunfire, failing shields or the impacts of their shots he couldn't say, but less than a dozen rounds emerged towards them from the chaos they were creating, and of those only three hit them. His own shields shrugged one shot to his midriff off easily, and Melenis absorbed two more like they'd been shooting paper wads.

Ten seconds was probably overkill, he caught himself thinking, and mentally shook himself. _No such thing as overkill._ Even after his own fire came to a halt, Melenis and Erash gave the hall another couple of seconds under the hammer until they stopped almost simultaneously. Nothing made a sound but Garrus's own breathing and the ringing in his ears, which was threatening to set up shop and become a permanent fixture, until Melenis transferred his gun to one hand as effortlessly as if it had been made of hollow plastic and pressed a couple of buttons on the golden omnitool on his wrist. The faint sound of a ventilation system started up, and the smoke rapidly began to clear, sucked up into well-hidden ceiling vents.

If the destruction they'd left behind last time was major, this was catastrophic. They'd blown a hole a foot deep into solid durasteel at the end of the corridor, left hundreds upon hundred of coin-sized holes in the walls, ceiling and floor, obliterated every single shield they'd set up and killed dozens of people. The stench of blood was overpowering, filling every crevice of his olfactory system with that familiar coppery odour, and it wasn't surprising; again, they'd left very few bodies fully intact, with all those that weren't pumping litres of blue blood onto the floor. The walls were practically painted with it. The ceiling dripped with it from great wide splashes. Limbs lay severed and abandoned, almost floating next to blood-soaked rifles they'd dropped. _Like something out of a cheap horror holo. I thought they were over the top. They were conservative! I guess it makes sense, though... call it thirty bodies, assume a couple of litres bled out apiece, and that's a hell of a lot of blood. Maybe we should give the address to a blood bank. Or a vampire._

"I think," Erash said, after a short pause, "that we won."

"Man," Sidonis complained, "you guys get all the fun. They're not even trying to come this way! Bunch of pussies."

"None?" Melenis said. "I expected more reinforcements to have come by now."

"Maybe they moved around?" Garrus said. "There were more here than you estimated."

"True," Melenis said, but he sounded troubled.

They began to pick their way through the blood-drenched debris, keeping up the lumbering trot the size of their guns dictated. Garrus's shoulders were beginning to complain at the abuse, but he consoled himself with the thought that there was only one more turn left until he could get the hell out of this building. All he could smell was that unpleasant mix of bodily fluids particularly traumatic deaths tended to unleash, and it was driving a pounding headache. Every time he lifted a foot, blood dripped from it into the general pool, and whenever it came down he could distinctly hear the splash.

"That guy's lungs don't look too healthy," Sidonis said conversationally. "Look, they're all black."

"Those are burn marks," Melenis said.

"Oh yeah. Well, it's probably still not healthy."

They came to the corner, and Melenis held out a hand to stop them. It was deathly quiet, aside from a few ambient noises – the crackling of flaming bodies, the drip of blood, the hissing of the wall they'd blasted through as it cooled – but there were no voices. No movement. Nothing.

Melenis stepped out into the corridor, surveyed it for a second, then nodded to them. Garrus followed him out, and saw what looked like, at least in comparison to what they'd just seen, an almost pristine hallway. There were two dead bodies, each face-down in small pools of blue blood, but aside from that it was entirely empty. At the end, fifteen metres away, the wall had been blown away, replaced by an opening into a dark, cramped, metal tube that extended a good five or six metres. Daylight was visible around the edges, and it was bobbing up and down very slightly. _And there's our ticket out of here._

"Our chariot awaits," Erash said, and started forward. Melenis extended one long arm again and stopped him in his tracks. The salarian frowned up at him. "What?"

"It may be a trap," Melenis said slowly. "Deus has far more force than this at his disposal, even taking travel time into account."

"So what? Maybe he doesn't think we're worth it any more, I don't know. Let's just go!" Erash said impatiently.

"No, he would only have sent this much strength in the first place if he thought he was getting more than us."

Erash paused for a second. "You think they were after Sensat?"

"Almost certainly. For all they knew, he was probably in the building. But if they do not believe he can be extracted alive-"

A vast, booming explosion rolled through the hallway, and the entire building seemed to shake along with the roar. _That was behind us! And... above us..._

"They're blowing the building!" he said urgently.

"RUN!" Melenis commanded. He surged ahead even as Garrus was getting his feet in gear, powering ahead faster than seemed possible even with the vast weapon. There wasn't time to drop his own; he'd have to stop just to lever the strap back over his head, and it wouldn't make a difference over such a short distance anyway. At least, that was what he told himself. Half a second later, when he'd made barely a metre, another cataclysmic explosion blasted through the structure, horribly, horribly close and louder than hell, and he stumbled a little as Erash and Sidonis pulled ahead of him. Melenis was somehow already in the damn vehicle, leaping straight in and storming up to the cockpit while unhitching his cannon, and then a third, fourth and fifth explosion went off almost at once. The noise was deafeaning as the corridor they'd just redecorated caved in, and he felt the heat of the blast uncomfortably warm on his neck as he ran. More crashes and rumbles shivered through the floor from far below, and he realised with a thrill of horror that they _were_ bringing the whole building down, not just the top floors. Suddenly, that fifteen metres felt like a marathon.

Erash and Sidonis had lighter guns, and Sidonis had already cast his aside before diving into the inviting opening. Erash had held onto his, and jumped in five metres ahead of Garrus. He tensed as he made up the last few, heart pounding in his ears, and was maybe a metre short when the corridor detonated in a cloud of fire and shrapnel. A heavy, hot fist punched him in the back and sent him hurtling off his feet to sprawl painfully in the back of the vehicle, and the breath left him as he accidentally cushioned the fall of his gun with his stomach. Then the world seemed to change direction as the shockwave pushed them away from the wall and down into the waiting drop in a steep dive, and a tongue of bright flame billowed above them where they'd been a second before. The sudden motion send him tumbling head over heels down the length of the tube, mercifully away from the open end but less mercifully directly into both Erash and Sidonis, and even as the engine kicked in and Melenis wrenched the car out of freefall they landed in a heavy, painfully metallic heap.

Garrus struggled to his feet as the angle evened out, and the vehicle howled away from the building. He got his first good look at it; it was nondescript, about eighty or ninety metres tall and built in the standard, minimalist and utilitarian Valac design. However, it did stand out, for the notable reason that it was on fire and seemed to be exploding.

"Oh, fuck me," Erash moaned, standing just in time to see the battered building's upper floors give in. They collapsed inwards in a thick cloud of grey dust, and then the weight became too much for the structure to bear; the entire top half of the building followed suit and imploded unceremoniously, tumbling down with a roar of masonry and screech of failing metal until it reached equilibrium and stopped itself having cut the building almost in half. Thick plumes of dust were still rising from the ruined structure as the devastation screamed to a halt, and most of one side of the building had entirely fallen away into the street below.

_What the hell have I got myself mixed up in?_

"Fuck," Erash repeated. "Fuck! Oh, Sensat is gonna be _pissed!_"

"Vehicles on a pursuit course," Melenis called back from the pilot's seat. "Erash, you must drive."

"What? Why?" Erash said, scrambling up towards the front of the car. "Can't you-"

"Yes," Melenis said, emerging from the cockpit. Erash yelped and hurled himself at the controls he'd abandoned, and Melenis stooped to reclaim his gun from the floor by his feet. "Garrus," he said – _first name terms already? -_ "you still have ammo, correct?"

"Uh, yeah," Garrus said, checking his indicator. It told him he still had a good forty seconds of fire left, and he tried not to think just how expensive that had to be.

"Then it is time to put it to use," Melenis said calmly, and stepped past Sidonis to the square aperture at the end of the vehicle. Garrus's eyes followed him, and saw, past the volus's shoulder and through the mist of rain, several long, grey boxes following them, almost certainly the same type of car and uncomfortably close. _OK, I'm thinking they've switched from 'take them alive' to 'the hell with it, kill the lot of them'. Not really an ideal position by any standards,_ _and judging by what they did to the building, I'd say they have pretty heavy weapons._

_Then again..._

He glanced down at the minigun still hanging faithfully by his side, and smiled thinly as he stepped forward, barrel gleaming brightly at the ready.

_Then again, so do we._


	13. Divine Intervention: Troubles

******DIVINE INTERVENTION**

**SIX: TROUBLES**

* * *

_So, I'm standing two feet away from a drop of I don't even want to try and guess how many metres in a speeding aircar, and being shot at._

_This sucks._

There were four vehicles pursuing them, from what he could see, but they were grey machines in a grey city under grey skies. It wasn't exactly the best position if you were just trying to see them, let alone shoot them out of the sky. The rain wasn't helping, and every few seconds and every turn of the car wrenched them out of his sight again, only for them to come screaming back in.

Garrus grunted and loosed a couple of seconds of fire at a grey blur he was almost certain was one of the pursuing vehicles. _Key word almost._ A streak of orange light blazed out through the rain, vaporising the water in a short spray of steam as it did, but he had no idea if it had hit its target or even if he'd been aiming at a target. As if in reply, a bright speck emerged from somewhere out of the scene before him and blasted towards them, and he flinched at the speed of the thing before it jetted away past them and into the sky, missing by no more than ten metres.

"They have missiles," Sidonis said anxiously, "they have missiles! I want missiles!"

Erash jerked the car hard to the left, and Garrus stumbled as the world past the open end of the vehicle span. Sidonis grabbed his shoulder from behind to steady him, and he managed to get his feet back under him as the car roared between two tall towers. They were maybe two hundred metres in the air, well above a lot of the buildings, but like any modern metropolis there were dozens upon dozens of skyscrapers looming menacingly up out of the rain's mist, and the simple, utilitarian design of damn near every one of them lent the scene an almost nightmarish tinge. There was practically no colour that he could make out, just shades of grey and pinpricks of dim light flickering in the distance, and the rain seemed to be getting even heavier. Cold wind was howling across the open end of the car as he and Melenis stood, guns at the ready, but there was nothing to shoot.

Then there was some sort of movement, coming through the gap they'd just screamed through at what had to be at least twice the speed limit – _C-Sec mentality, there probably isn't even a speed limit here_ – and Melenis's vast gun wailed beside him, spitting bolts of searing blue energy into the rain. He held his fire for more than five seconds, and Garrus sent a couple of seconds of his own in the same general direction, but there was no rewarding explosion, although he wasn't sure if they'd even have heard it through the sound of their fire.

"You get them?" Erash called from the cockpit.

"No idea!" Garrus shouted back, just as another missile whipped out of the grey blur of the cityscape, this one powering past about twenty or thirty metres to their right.

"They can't lock on," Melenis said. "If they could, they could easily destroy us."

"I think we've got some kind of ECM," Erash said, "but I'm damned if I know what."

"We got weapons?" Sidonis asked.

"Front-mounted only!"

Another bright spear screamed as it came right at them, and Garrus flinched, fully expecting to be blown apart, but Erash had to have tracked it on sensors because the whole vehicle dropped out from underneath him for a second, plummeting long enough to avoid the missile. He stumbled yet again as they whipped away to the right, but Melenis was standing firm and sighting carefully down his barrel. The maser spat and flickered a bright blue as it belched energy for a controlled burst of two seconds, and suddenly a rapidly expanding orange fireball burned brightly against the grey clouds a few hundred metres behind him. The sound came a split-second later, a low snarl that sounded like distant thunder, barely audible over the engine and wind, and the flames winked away in the rushing wind as quickly as they'd appeared.

"Scratch one," Garrus murmured, as Melenis lowered his weapon slightly, and then something changed in the car's movement, or at least seemed to. The floor suddenly stopped changing angle every second, and he watched the view outside the door twist violently in a half-roll as the car snapped around a building with gees that would have decked a krogan even as it felt like he was standing perfectly level.

_Wait, I am. It's just that the level I'm standing on happens to be, um, sideways._

"Oh, wow," Erash called. "I just found the inertial compensators. This shit's high-tech!"

_He's right. Full internal gravity stabilisation on a vehicle this size... there's some serious money right there. Hell, most military cars don't have that!_

The view rolled a full turn and streaked sideways for a second, and suddenly the streets were above them and the clouds below. Erash whooped as they dived down – _or up, as it were_ – and blasted along barely a hundred metres off the ground, before the view changed again and they were staring directly downwards as the car climbed parallel to the side of a building. Garrus barely had time to mentally process it before another missile cracked into the building thirty below them, where they'd been just half a second before, and a bright explosion roared. A whisper of movement in his field of vision fired his instincts, and his gun was up and running before he'd even thought, spewing golden fire towards the ground as they cleared the top of the skyscraper. Another missile went past, but he didn't even register how close it came to obliterating their car as he steered his fire onto what he'd seen, and he was rewarded by seeing one of the pursuing vehicles suddenly spiral into clear view a hundred metres down, smoke billowing from a gash in its side, and start to tumble aimlessly. Their own car made a snap vector change into a steep, rolling dive with a speed that would have turned them to paste if not for the compensators as he ended his fire, and he turned back to the cockpit.

"Erash! Take us _up! _There's civilians down there!"

"He's right," Melenis said. "We can't take this to the city."

"They'll pulverise us if we don't use the city!" Erash shouted back, and the car corkscrewed wildly out of its dive at immeasurable speeds. "These missiles only show up on sensors every other time! I can't dodge them!"

"We go up, we die!" Sidonis said. "It's too open!"

"Works both ways!" Garrus replied. "We can take them out!"

Yet another missile hammered past metres away, mercifully heading skyward rather than to the ground, and they rolled again as the remaining pursuers flashed in and out of sight behind them, keeping pace with what had to be incredible piloting skill. The wind roared louder than ever, ripping the last shreds of heat out of the car as cold air blasted in.

"There's more of them! And they're angry! And-"

"Do it," Melenis said simply. His voice was amplified only enough to make it audible over the gale, but it was imbued with enough authority to make Sidonis's mouth slam shut instantly. _A potent skill indeed._

"Fuck it, fine!" Erash snarled, and the ground swung into place at ninety degrees again as the car climbed. "But if we die, I'm blaming you three!"

"Hey! I agreed with you!" Sidonis said hotly.

"_Especially _you!"

The city was plummeting away from them almost vertically as the car raced upwards, making the open end of the vehicle look less like a door than a satellite image being zoomed out on a viewscreen. Not for the first time, Garrus found himself really, really hoping that the inertial compensators were well-made. If they failed... _you know, I don't really want to think about it. Not that that's going to stop me._

"How many?" Garrus called, as the car started to level out. They were several kilometres in the air, from what he could tell, and the combination of the climate, the wind and the height was sending vicious chills through him despite the insulation in his armour, and it was still damn near impossible to see more than a half-glimpse of their pursuers.

"At least three," Melenis said. "Likely more."

"I'm seeing between four and, uh, twelve from up here," Erash's voice floated back. "ECM's too strong to get good locks!"

Melenis rattled off a five-second stream of fire, and Garrus followed suit, picking one of the dozens of flecks of movement that might have been an enemy vehicle and hammering the space around it with enough fire to seriously damage a battlecruiser. There was no rewarding explosion, just a line of steam as the rain evaporated against the sheer heat of the thing, but in answer a pair of missiles streaked out from the mist, two white-hot javelins fired almost at once from two positions a few hundred metres away. One passed harmlessly away to the left even as Garrus opened up fire again in the direction it had come from, but one scorched past beneath them with what seemed like half a metre to spare. He actually felt the heat from the drive bubble up to his face, and the view before them wobbled as the car was buffeted.

Sidonis was shouting something behind him, but he assumed it wasn't important. He kept his gun thrumming against his hip as his fire lit up the sky like a neon wire, stabbing at the general area around where he'd seen the missile emerge from. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Melenis's blue pulses racing away in another direction, and then something exploded. A painfully bright sphere of pure white light surged outwards at the end of his fire stream, expanding to what looked like maybe twenty metres across before winking away just as the whip-crack of the explosion reached his ears.

_That looked bad. I think I blew up something very expensive._

_Well, what else is new?_

He kept his finger hard down on the trigger and swept the barrel quickly across to the right, tracing around the area where Melenis was sending his own fire. Their own car was twisting and turning beneath them, bending the firestreams into bright snake patterns, but he hung on to keep the shots hammering at roughly the right area. It was impossible to tell who delivered the killing blow through the rain and the motion blur, but another explosion sprang out with a resounding boom, this one a burst of fire rather than the white light he'd seen earlier. _Maybe I holed the reactor last time?_

"There's still more out there," Sidonis said grimly, as their fire drizzled out. He was right; Garrus could still make out a few sudden darts of grey metal through the fog of rain, but they were altering position so quickly and so drastically that it was impossible to number them or even see them clearly, let alone shoot them down. _They're learning._

"Top right," Melenis said, and started his maser up again with an electric howl. His fire crashed into what looked like an empty area of sky – _but who knows what kind of sensors he's got?_ Garrus opened up again in the same direction as two more missiles came streaking towards them from their pursuers, both of them coming from positions a few hundred metres below them. One was wild, missing on the left of them by a hundred metres. One was closer, about twenty metres off the other side but still missing, and he started to put it out of his mind... as Erash, unsighted, wrenched the car away from the first shot and directly into the second.

It happened in about half a second tops. Garrus barely had time to understand what was going on before the car seemed to break in half, and a storm of shrapnel erupted from the car behind him as the explosion roared its dreadful fire behind him and lifted him off his feet. He was dimly aware that the compensators had failed as he sailed towards the open doorway and the inviting fall, able to feel the strap of his gun snapping, though whether from the sheer force or a shard of metal he didn't know, and he saw Melenis losing his own footing, starting to fall just before he did, heard Sidonis's shouting in shock behind him as all three of them were hurled over the edge – but Melenis's hands were coming up, his maser tumbling away beneath them towards the city below – bizarrely, the first thought coming into his head was wondering how much damage that would do – and something in his hands was _glowing_, a bright blue light searing through black suit as he brought them up – and then an even stronger force than the hammer of the explosion punched a cushion of hard air into him from the front, the sheer power of it enormous, enough to change his direction entirely and send him flying into Sidonis, send both of them hurtling back into the car as Melenis disappeared from view beneath the edge of the doorway, and bright lights danced in his head-

* * *

Melenis fell.

It didn't particularly worry him. There were four separate ways his augmentations could have saved his life from a fall even from this height, and all of them very much workable.

But that wasn't the problem. As he tumbled head over heels, his maser fell away to the side, far too distant for his repulsors to reach it – he'd blown almost the entire charge blasting Vakarian and Sidonis back into the vehicle, but even if they'd been at full power it wouldn't have been enough. A quick check through sensor logs, conducted at something approaching light speed, confirmed he'd seen Vakarian's weapon falling as well, even if only for a second – and Erash's, although it would hardly have been of any help.

That meant that the car he'd just been blown out of was helpless. A cursory check done during the milliseconds his head was facing back towards it told him the damage was largely aesthetic, the missile having only clipped it and blown away extraneous material. The main systems still looked to be functioning more or less acceptably, although performance would certainly take a hit. _That_ meant that the pursuers would soon catch up and blow them out of the sky.

That would be bad.

So, as he began to pick up speed, he considered his options.

One: fall to the ground, leaving them behind. He dismissed it out of hand.

Two: not to fall to the ground, and to help them.

That sounded more like it. The only problem would be executing it.

A bright red sensor matrix flashed up in front of his eyes, the miniaturised computers within predicting the flight paths of the following vehicles he'd been able to see mid-tumble. Two were above him, inaccessible. One was roughly level. Possible, yet very risky. Two were below him. One was at far too shallow an angle to him. That left only one possible option: the lowest of the boxlike vehicles, which would pass directly beneath him in zero point eight three three seconds.

Forcefields fired along his arms like miniature blue fireworks, manipulated so that they weren't so much fields as they were makeshift manoeuvring jets. It crossed his mind that that would be a useful feature for Sensat to add, and he filed it away for later discussion as the 'jets' started to change his course by fractions of degrees. From an outside perspective, he would appear to be falling helplessly, out of all control, but the computers were working overtime to adjust his trajectory as the car powered nearer.

The logic was simple. He could not do anything to help them by himself, at least not from this position. Therefore, he required something with which he could help them. And therefore...

His kinetic barriers sharpened themselves into a sharp, bladelike shape around his feet, designed to flatten and depress the instant it came into contact with anything solid. It would penetrate the roof of the vehicle and then slow his descent, preventing him from merely crashing straight through the floor.

In theory.

His feet smashed through the top of the aircar as he reached it, then slammed down hard on the deck beneath it. It dented slightly, but held firm.

That was good.

Armoured troopers were shouting in surprise around him, bringing guns up to fire or scrambling back away from him. He estimated that there were fourteen crammed into the narrow space. They were armed. He was alone, and his only weapons were his own two hands.

They never stood a chance.

* * *

"GARRUS! Wake the _fuck _up!"

He was on his back on the floor of the car, staring up at Sidonis's face, mouth open mid-curse. Past him was the sky where there should have been the ceiling, which had retreated several metres and was looking rather more jagged than before. Pleasantly cool rain was splattering gently onto his face, and for all the world it felt like they weren't moving an inch – but the skies above were twisting wildly, like watching a rapidly rotating viewscreen.

_Oh. The inertial compensators are back online. That's... that's good._

_Wait, why were they offline?_

_...oh._

Realisation was better than any stimulant, propelling him back to his feet so fast that Sidonis jerked away with a yelp of surprise. Blood was trickling down the side of his head from where he'd hit it, but that didn't seem to matter as he surveyed the destruction. They'd been blasted back to the far end of the cabin, right up against the cockpit, but instead of a tube ending in a hatch of light they were standing in a newly-made convertible. Half of the roof had been ripped clean away by the missile along with a large chunk of the left-hand wall, leaving the edge of the remaining metal wobbling in the wind, but there was still structural integrity, or at least enough to stop the whole thing from being ripped away into the air and the compensators with it.

But it was empty. His gun had gone. The shrapnel had mostly been blown out by the temporary compensator failure that had almost killed them. Erash's grenade launched had vanished. Worst of all, there was no sign of Melenis.

_He saved us..._

"-the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck!" Erash sang. "Talk to me! Mel! What the-"

"He's dead," Sidonis called back.

"What?"

"I said he's dead! Went right over the edge!"

Erash uttered a short, harsh laugh. "You think that's gonna kill him?"

Garrus and Sidonis looked at each other.

"Is it not?" Garrus asked.

"Just you wait and- _shit!_"

They spiralled down into a rolling dive just in time to duck under an incoming missile, and Garrus saw it shoot past through the hole in the side of the car close enough to feel the heat. He shook his head, trying to dispel the slight double vision he was getting, but it just made it worse. There was a terrible feeling of helplessness welling up inside him, frustration at being unarmed and unable to do anything, anything at all, all while people shot at him... _and the only one who could have helped us is gone. Doesn't matter if he's dead or not, he's too far away to get back, and without weapons – and I could swear we're slower now – they'll pick us off sooner or later. I don't even know who this Deus is! It doesn't seem fair to be killed on the orders of someone just because you got caught up in this damn stupid business-_

A loud, heavy _whump_ went up behind them, a couple of hundred metres back. He blinked_, _and whirled to face the doorway, wiping rain and blood from his eyes in time to see a bright orange explosion shrink and fade away.

"What the hell was that?" Sidonis said. "Was that-"

"One of them just exploded," Erash confirmed. "No fucking idea why, but I'll take what I can get!"

"Friendly fire? Could have been a simple mistake," Garrus said.

"No way," the salarian called back. "That's an impossible friendly fire shot! The angle's all wrong!"

"Then what-"

As the car snapped into another impossibly tight roll and span upwards, another huge blast echoed down the length of the vehicle as another spectacularly vivid fireball billowed outwards behind them.

"Another one?" Sidonis said in astonishment. "Someone's shooting 'em down for us!"

"I'm not sure that's wholly a good thing," Garrus said slowly. "Could it be cops? Does this world even have them?"

"Private ops only," Sidonis said. "So unless we're stepping on some important toes-"

"They've stopped firing," Garrus said suddenly. "They're not firing at us!"

"What the fuck is going on down there?" Sidonis said, walking to the end of the car as the world span dizzyingly past the doorway. "There's someone-"

He turned back, as if struck by a sudden thought.

"You don't think-"

"No," Garrus said. "I don't. He might be able to survive a fall from here, but he can't- there's no way- is there?"

"You tell me," Sidonis replied, and another crashing explosion sparkled beneath them, out of sight but close enough to be loud as all hell. Garrus groaned as the noise sent a shard of pain through his head like an ice-cold nail, and made a mental note to start wearing a helmet as soon as possible. _I mean, what kind of idiot would go into a firefight with an unprotected head? Aside from me, obviously._

"I don't get it!" Erash called. "I'm not seeing any extra spots on sensors, and I'm barely picking up the cars after us! Anything doing that would show up here, but I'm not seeing anything at all!"

"Stealth systems?" Garrus shouted back.

"Might be," Erash conceded, "but that shit's black-ops, man! Hierarchy, Citadel, _maybe_ asari, but it's all prototypes! Nobody would send one of those after us-"

"-unless they knew what we do," Sidonis finished. "Maybe they're the next in line for the 'steal the ship, kill the universe' thing?"

"How could they know we're here?" Garrus said. "They can't be-"

A distant rumble interrupted him, and their heads snapped around in unison in time to see the fireball bursting outwards like sped-up footage of a flower blooming, below and behind them and further away than any of the others they'd seen.

"That's... there's only one left," Erash said disbelievingly. "I – wait..."

There was a pause of a few seconds. Garrus glanced at Sidonis, who shrugged.

"Don't look at me," he said. "I have no idea what's going on. Like, at all. I'm just rolling with it."

"Fair enough," Garrus said vaguely, before Erash suddenly laughed delightedly.

"Oh, man," he called back, "this is... just look!"

The car's speed nosedived until they were sailing along at barely twenty kph, flat and level.

"What are you-" Sidonis began frantically, then cut himself off as another vehicle, one just like their own, matched speeds with them as it rose up from beneath them. There was a jagged hole in its roof, a rough circle about a metre across, but other than that it was undamaged.

"You're shitting me," Sidonis said flatly.

_No way. There's just no way._

The cockpit moved level with the gaping rip down the side of their car, and Garrus stared across through the rain and the plastic windshield into the face of the pilot; into the face of Melenis.

"How... what... what?" he said, going for expediency over coherence.

"Pertinent questions all, and we will discuss them in due time once we have confirmed our escape," the volus's amplified voice rang out, and Garrus knew, _knew_ that there was a hint of smugness in there. _Not that I can say he hasn't earned it._

"For the moment, however," Melenis continued, "I do not believe we will be troubled any further."


	14. Divine Intervention: Genesis

_AUTHOR'S NOTE: If you read any chapters before the 10th of September, you might be wondering why several character names have suddenly changed. Bioware recently released the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC, which reveals the names of Garrus's entire squad, necessitating name changes. There are some other additions to canon in there as well, but they don't seem to conflict badly with anything I've written. I hope. If I seem to change my mind on certain details, though, it's probably because those heartless bastards at Bioware forced me to. Plus, they totally stole my car chase scene. Bastards.

* * *

_

**DIVINE INTERVENTION**

**SEVEN: GENESIS

* * *

**

In the end, they abandoned their original aircar for the one Melenis had somehow acquired. For some reason, Garrus felt far more comfortable in a vehicle with intact sides than in one without, even if there was a hole in the roof and a nasty-looking dent in the floor beneath it.

And blood on the floor. And walls. And roof.

The bodies were gone, at least. He'd been vaguely worried that someone might step into the street only to take a heavily-armoured corpse travelling at terminal velocity to the face, but in the excitement they'd actually strayed beyond the city part of the island and into the industrialised outskirts, all massive machinery and no inconvenient innocent bystanders. _Good place to have a firefight. I'll add it to the list._

That made it easier to dump their old car, as well. As Melenis hauled the double doors at the end of the vehicle closed, Garrus could still see it hovering there, broken and abused yet still powered, and with any luck nobody would even notice when it eventually dropped out of the sky and exploded. _Then again, luck isn't my strong suit._

Erash had taken the controls again, albeit more sedately, which left the three of them to make themselves comfortable as best they could in the spartan surroundings. There were a few plastic planks on hinges that could be pulled down from the sides to use as seats, but they weren't exactly designed for comfort, so Garrus and Sidonis ended up sprawled against a wall that didn't have too much blood on it. Melenis had shrunken back to a less terrifying size, but he still preferred to stand. Garrus found himself idly wondering about that suit again, about the sheer technology that had to be behind it, as he stared up at the hole in the ceiling. The rain had slackened enough to be pleasantly cool on his face, and it was doing wonders for the headache he'd been nursing since he'd woken up in that room less than an hour ago. He closed his eyes, tilted his head back and waited.

It took them about ten minutes to coast back to a multi-storey warehouse perched on top of an apartment block in the inimitable Valac style of building up rather than out. It looked entirely nondescript, although everything in the city did to some extent, but when the aircar touched down inside and Melenis opened the doors, there was another aircar waiting there. It was a mid-range Ratak model, the sort that wouldn't have stood out on any planet in the galaxy and had likely been chosen for exactly that reason. It was an entirely unexciting dull red in colour, roughly the same hue as Melenis's suit.

There wasn't exactly any point in resisting, especially without weapons, so he and Sidonis ended up in the back while Erash and Melenis took the front seats.

"Well," Sidonis said, as the car hummed up from the ground, "this is nice. Nobody's trying to kill us."

"Yeah, yeah," Erash said over his shoulder. "Don't think you're out of it yet. We've got to take this back to the boss, and he's going to be really, really pissed. Personally, I'm hoping he'll mostly be mad at you."

"We didn't actually do anything," Garrus pointed out. "We turned up here, then you attacked us. Then other people attacked you. And you were the ones who let them blow up a building full of ultra-expensive hardware."

"Goddess, don't even remind me. We are so taking a pay cut for this. That should pay for it. In about eighty-five years' time."

"My heart bleeds for you," Garrus said icily, "but if you recall, we're the ones who you seem very eager to torture."

"Well, we wouldn't bloody _have_ to if you'd just give us the codes," Erash said, as the car slipped into an automated traffic lane, "but _no_, you have to play the hero. Our boss doesn't even want to use the ADAPT thing, you know. He just wants what's his back."

"If he didn't want to use it, why the fuck did he build it?" Sidonis said.

"Look, man, I don't know," Erash muttered. "We're just grunts, and he's the executive. But it's complicated, I know that much, and you're just making it worse."

"Well, excuse me for living," Garrus said, and leaned back into the comfortable seat, eyes closed.

_Why does everything have to move so damn fast? Then again, maybe I should be thankful that it's like that. At least that means nobody has the time to torture me. But we had a lead, thanks to Vunas, and we could have followed that up, but instead, we're here with these guys because... because..._

_Wait._

_Oh no._

"We need to get to Vunas, _now!_" he said. Sidonis started beside him, then looked over.

"What? Can't it wait-"

"They found us because they recognised the trace software you used when you traced Vunas's call, right?" Garrus said quickly to Melenis, almost tripping over his words.

"Yes," the volus said slowly.

"Then they'll be wondering who you traced! They've lost contact with their aircars, so they have to assume we escaped – and that means they'll be looking for another lead. They must know who called us. They'll be bringing her in right now!"

"True," Melenis said, with no change in tone. "Erash, get us to the Lines. Quickly."

"What, you think-"

"Do it."

_There it is again. It's the same voice as ever... I think, but damn it if I don't immediately want to do whatever it tells me to. A commander's voice._

"OK, OK," Erash said, and yanked the car hard to the right. The inertia was mostly absorbed so that all Garrus felt was a faint twitch, but they were already speeding away from the traffic lane at two hundred kph a second later. "I don't see what the big deal is. She's just a feeder-"

"No, you don't get it!" Sidonis said urgently. "She- she knows about the ship, she knows we have the codes!"

"Oh, for the love of- you _fuckwits!_" Erash snarled, and gunned the car even harder. "Do you do _anything_ but fuck up, over and goddamn over-"

"Exactly how much does she know?" Melenis said, drowning out a tirade of obscenities. "It is important, in the event that-"

"We know why," Sidonis snapped.

"I..." Garrus tried to think back, to remember just what they'd told her, but it was difficult with his mind still fuzzy from too many blows to the head. _She knows... names, what we did, how we escaped... _"She knows most of it."

Erash grunted in dismay from the front seat at that, but kept his eyes resolutely fixed on the raindrops hissing away into superheated steam the instant they touched the windshield.

"We didn't tell her what berth the ship's at," Sidonis offered. "She didn't know-"

"Won't help," Erash said shortly. "If he knows timeframe, Deus has the resources to find that ship. There'll be records, sensor data- it's all he needs."

The city was flashing past the window so fast it was no more than a blur, and the aircar's engine was audibly whining as it stormed across it. It could have been left on autopilot for such a simple, straight-line journey, but Erash was still gripping the controls so tightly that Garrus could see his slender knuckles paling. They stayed at their top speed as the seconds slowly ticked by, sitting in silence. There wasn't anything else to say.

_That call probably saved our lives, and she might get herself killed for it. At least Chirin understood what she was doing. She deliberately got herself mixed up in this crazy situation, and she made her choice. Vunas... we dragged Vunas in because we knew she was desperate, and now there are people after her and it's not her fault. It's ours._

_No, not ours._

_Mine._

"The twelfth floor of Building Four, Street One-Hundred-And-Sixteen," Melenis said quietly, after a couple of minutes. "Southern face."

"Got it."

The car was slowing a little to find its bearings, but it was still incredibly fast, so much so that it had to have had its factory limiters disabled. A lane of traffic whipped overhead like a cable as the aircar whistled into the Lines at a downward slant, before they rolled halfway onto their side to snap into one of the eponymous avenues, the buildings on each side not far below them.

"Ah, shit," Erash murmured, staring at something through the windshield. Garrus craned his neck to see, heart suddenly racing, but he couldn't make anything out but the city and the rain as the car slowed further still. Then he saw it; barely visible against the monochrome backdrop, there was a plume of thick grey smoke rising into the air, maybe a hundred metres distant. It was curling up from the face of a building from what looked like a single room, and now that his eyes were following it down he could make out dim red light in the room it came from. A room on what looked roughly like the twelfth floor.

_Too late._

They pulled up beside the decaying edifice and hovered there in silence. They were close enough now to see directly into what had been Vunas's apartment until a few minutes ago, but there was nothing to see but fire, and great mountains of smoke writhing into the rain like snakes. The flames roared wall-to-wall, engulfing everything and licking hungrily around the surrounding rooms. The whole building would probably go up eventually, but the concern barely even registered in his mind, dwarfed by the deep, dark realisation that Vunas was gone.

The next leg of the journey took no more than fifteen minutes, but it felt ten times that. Garrus had his eyes closed for most of it, leaning to one side with his forehead pressed up against the cool window.

_How do we do this every time? We start to get somewhere, we screw up and everything collapses around our ears. Two steps forward and an explosion sends you flying back five feet. Why must everything I do end in spectacular failure?_

_But we haven't lost yet. In fact, I can't lose. I can't fail. The only way I could do that is by giving up the codes, and I'd die before that. Me and a lot of others. I've seen hundreds die for the ship already. What's one more?_

_But you don't think that,_that familiar voice of doubt whispered. _You could cut the knot and kill yourself. Delete the codes. Don't have the balls, do you? You're not fighting for anything but yourself. Truth, freedom and the turian way? You know that's not what you want. You want to live, and you'll risk billions of lives for just that. _

_You tell yourself you'd die for them. Prove it._

He sighed heavily and pulled away from the window, massaging his temples. It always gave him a headache when his mind disagreed with itself, and right now things were feeling particularly painful.

"Not your fault, man," Sidonis said.

Garrus looked up mid-massage. "What?"

Sidonis smiled thinly. "You know what I mean. I can tell what you're thinking. I think it might be something like 'Oh, I've dragged a poor innocent woman into this and now she might get killed and it's all my fault', yeah?"

"Am I that predictable?"

"Well, yeah. You're pretty much one big patchwork of guilt issues," Sidonis said. "At least I vary it a bit. You know, 'abandonment issues' here, 'mild paranoia' there, regular stuff. Everyone in the galaxy's got issues coming out of their asses, me and you definitely included. You seem like you're trying to carry the galaxy on your shoulders, you know?"

Garrus blinked in surprise, and looked Sidonis in the eye. He looked calmer than he'd ever seen him, but before he'd taken that to be anger, grief, shock dulling his expression. Only now did he realise that that serendipity wasn't a mask or a by-product, but just what was there – acceptance.

"You see," Sidonis went on, "you're trying to do this whole thing by yourself. And there's basis for that, what with you having the only set of codes to a giant poison murder thing, but it's all control issues. Why'd you quit C-Sec? Too many regulations. You don't like it when you're not in control, and so you automatically think that everything that goes wrong is your fault. Some of it is. A lot of it ain't. Most of it's sheer dumb fuckin' luck. You're trying to take every punch on your chin instead of rolling with 'em. Let it go, man. The past is the past. You can't change it, but you can change the future. People get killed, yeah. People get hurt and fucked over and used whatever you do. You're not a god. There's shit you can't change, so don't beat yourself up if something goes wrong."

Garrus realised his mouth was stupidly hanging open, and slammed it shut. _Where the hell did that come from?_

_And he's right. Damn it, you know he's right._

_Doesn't mean I have to like it, but he's right.  
_

"Or, you know, whatever," Sidonis said, and sat back again. "Do what you want. That's just what I think."

"Oh, thank the Goddess," Erash said drily. "I was wondering how long I was going to have to listen to your little therapy session."

"Fuck you," Sidonis said, opting for the classic fallback. He wouldn't have admitted it, but Garrus was damn grateful they'd started bickering again; for once, it provided a welcome distraction from wallowing in self-doubt. _I should really do that less._

_Or should I?  
_

A couple of minutes of silence later, Erash announced that they'd arrived.

"What?" Garrus said, peering out of the window. "This is just-"

"A waste-disposal plant, yeah," Erash said. "Adapted a little, obviously, but it serves."

The car had swept low over a dense industrial park, filled with forbiddingly angular factories and plants of some description or another stacked a hundred metres tall with only narrow gaps between structures, before coasting to a halt and sliding down between a couple of them. Grey walls rose on either side, pushing in claustrophobically until the skycar ducked into an alcove Garrus hadn't even seen, about fifty metres up the building's side.

It turned out to be more than an alcove; it was only about ten metres in each direction at the entrance, but inside it ballooned outwards into an expansive garage five times the size of the opening, populated by over a dozen vehicles – everything from nondescript aircars like the one they were sitting in to a sleek, expensive-looking Volkswagen-Dal'Nak sports car to what looked like a miniature tank, a heavily armoured box about as aerodynamic as a paraplegic krogan. Their own car slid sideways into an open space and descended gracefully to the floor before the doors swung out and upwards with a quiet hiss.

Garrus stepped out, blinking, into the brightly lit room. The rain was still coming down past the entrance, but it felt oddly distant even when just a few metres away. The garage was bigger and airier than anything else he'd seen on Deinech so far, big enough to hold three times as many vehicles as it did and maybe even a small starship. They'd never have got it out through the smaller entrance, but the fact that as big a space as this in such a crowded city – and in one of the ultradense industrial areas, as well – even existed was surprising enough.

"OK, move it," Erash said, and gestured towards a door at the far end of the garage. "Sestat awaits. You're not stupid enough to try running, right?"

"Eh," Sidonis said, and shrugged. "Maybe."

"Don't worry, he meant 'of course not'," Garrus said, and headed for the door, stepping past an elegant Elkoss sedan on his way. Sidonis fell in beside him as Erash and Melenis followed.

"You know, back when I first started working for Vult," Sidonis said, "I calibrated my kinetic barriers to provide more protection for my back specifically so that running away from things would be easier."

"Did it help?"

"Well, I'm not dead yet."

The door split into two semicircles and slid away as they approached, leading into a long corridor done in a fetching industrial iron-grey. _Is there anything on this planet besides these blasted corridors? I mean, I know it saves space and that's important, but it's not exactly easy on the eyes._

_And it's empty. Again. There are dozens of doors, but the place is quiet as the grave. Nobody but us..._

Their footsteps were echoing loudly from the walls as they walked straight ahead, bouncing and rebounding so much that someone listening might have thought there was an army marching down the corridor. It was all fairly clean, with very few signs of wear, but it still felt oddly surreal, looking almost exactly like the enormous underground bases the more imaginative holovids seemed to be certain that C-Sec was hiding somewhere. The whole thing had an air of lapsed purpose, as if someone had built it and the forgotten about it for a while – like exploring an abandoned starship or cave system. _God knows I haven't seen enough of those._

"How can you people afford this?" Sidonis said, looking around. "The property value alone-"

"We're not really up on the financial side," Erash said. "We don't really know anything, to be honest."

"Well, that much was obvious," Sidonis said innocently.

"Cute."

"I try."

"Next left," Erash said, after a couple more doors. They stopped at another circular doorway, which slid apart as the last one had done to reveal a new room. As they stepped inside, a quiet thrill of recognition ran through Garrus as his eye took in the room's features.

It was a basic square, maybe forty metres across, although the ceiling hung claustrophobically low. The room was filled with workbenches, lockers, towering stacks of computers and general mess, densely packed so that walking through required careful pathfinding. The floor rippled with dozens of hard plastic power cables, running around and across the machinery and even up the walls and onto the ceiling, weaving around the dim fluorescent lights that seemed to be spaced almost at random. Through the complex arrangement, Garrus could make out what looked to be a central dais of some sort, raised slightly above the main floor with a corresponding rising ceiling that bulged upwards and outwards to accommodate an enormous central console, a huge high-tech pillar that might as well have had 'Control Hub' painted on it. It was all horribly familiar.

_Well, whatever happens, at least I'm confident that we found who built the ship. Has to be a krogan. Has to be. Nobody else can possibly have a design sense this poor._

_Except maybe the vorcha. Then again, if either a vorcha or a krogan can build tech like this, I'm pretty sure the galaxy's doomed anyway._

"Head for the centre," Erash advised, as they started picking their way through the maze. "He's usually up there. And try not to touch anything."

"Why, is it dangerous?" Garrus asked, as he passed a workbench supporting what looked like the opened torso of a mech unit, all wires and chipboards. It seemed to have been abandoned in the middle of work, like a toy thrown aside by a bored child.

"No idea," Erash said. "Probably. I like to think it adds an exciting air of mystery."

"The mystery of 'it might kill you, it might not'?" Garrus said, and ducked under a low-hanging cable. "I'm bored of that one."

They squeezed single-file between two large cooling towers and emerged out into the centre of the room, looking up at the vast central hub. It was definitely of roughly the same design as the ship, maybe even exactly the same; the consoles set around it looked identical to the idiosyncratic controls on its bridge, and the chaotic tumble of wires spreading out from it like a spider's web could have been taken straight from the ship. It was all done in that ever-present shade of industrial grey with occasional exciting patches of brown.

It was also empty.

"Uh, boss?" Erash said hesitantly, voice echoing off thousands of surfaces. "You in here? You _are_ still alive, right?"

There was a low-pitched scraping sound, and suddenly a wheeled chair rolled into view from the other side of the central console before coming to a stop a few metres in front of them. Slumped in it was a dark-skinned batarian, wearing a simple set of worn, torn and dirty grey overalls, sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

"Yes. Well?" he said, in a voice that sounded like it had gargled gravel for years.

"Uh, we, uh... these guys, uh, the ship," Erash explained.

"Not that!" the batarian snapped. "Why did all my feeds from the Terbax Building disappear?"

"Oh. Uh. That," Erash said. "Well, it kind of got... destroyed..."

"It was very pretty," Sidonis volunteered. "Lots of explosions."

"So noted," the batarian said. "Why?"

"It was my fault, sir," Melenis said, speaking up for the first time in a few minutes. "I neglected to encrypt a transmission trace correctly. Deus tracked the software and found us. I assume full responsibility."

"I wish you would let me upgrade your brain," the batarian said irritably. "You can survive atmospheric re-entry but you forget _that?_" He waved a dismissive hand. "Anyway, that doesn't matter. It was just our last base that he didn't know about, which coincidentally contained a great deal of extremely valuable equipment. I'm sure it won't be missed. Don't let it happen again."

"Yes, sir," Melenis said smoothly.

"What, that's _it?_" Erash demanded. "You docked my salary for two weeks because your coffee was cold!"

"Coffee is important," the batarian said defensively. "Anyway, it's good to see you. Well, not quite. I do not actively dislike seeing you."

"Love you too, Sensat," Erash muttered. "Should have known you weren't actually dead."

"Yes," Sensat said. "You should have. Anyway. Inform me."

"We have confirmed the location of the ship," Melenis said. "We do not yet possess the codes."

"Who does?"

"Uh, that would be me," Garrus said, raising a hand. "Hi."

The batarian focused on him for the first time, as if just noticing him, and sat up to stare at him with four dark eyes. "Ah, good. Give them to me."

"Oh, well, since you asked..." Garrus said sarcastically.

"Fine, it can wait," Sensat said, and Garrus blinked at the speed he'd simply dropped it and moved on. "What else?"

"These two are not working with Deus. They became involved independently. One was previously a low-level employee of Vult; however, he was no more than cannon fodder."

"Hey," Sidonis said indignantly.

"You have good reason to think this?" Sensat asked, ignoring Sidonis entirely.

"Yes, sir," Melenis said.

"So noted. What else?"

"Deus's agents have either acquired or killed an asari information dealer working with these two, most likely the former. Her knowledge will be enough to locate the ship, if relinquished."

"So noted."

"In the call I traced, she told us that the Emendus family are likely to be involved with Deus somehow."

"Interesting," Sensat said slowly, then suddenly leapt to his feet and walked over to them, coming to a stop very slightly too close to comfort from Garrus's face.

"Hello," Garrus said brightly.

Sensat's eyes glittered in the light as the batarian peered at him closely, as if trying to get into his head just by staring. Garrus stared back into the upper two eyes, watching for any sort of emotional reaction, but he'd never been any good at reading batarians, and for all he knew he could have been doing anything between assessing him as a threat and checking him out.

"...hello," Sensat said finally, after about ten seconds of silence. "You possess something that belongs to me."

"No," Garrus said in mock thoughtfulness, "no, I don't think I do."

"So noted," the batarian said, deadpan, and stepped back a few paces, leaving a faint musky scent hanging in the air. "Melenis. Who is he?"

"Garrus Vakarian, sir," Melenis said. "Former C-Sec investigator. He was part of Commander Shepard's task force and was present on the ground at the Battle of the Citadel."

"I also bake," Garrus added.

"Currently unemployed in any official capacity. He appears to have been working alone in Omega."

"Alone?" Sensat said.

"He and his companion met the night the ship left Omega," Melenis said. "Both were in pursuit of it."

"And this one-" Sensat jerked his head towards Sidonis "-worked for Vult?"

"Yes, sir. Lantar Sidonis. He claims to have been complicit in the destruction of the organisation."

"You believe him?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good enough. However, consider this: Vult falls. A day later, the specs of the ship are broadcast. Six days after that, the ship disappears from Omega in the hands of a former Vult agent. Are you telling me you really do not believe he is aligned with Deus?"

"Yes, sir," Melenis said, after a tiny pause. "It appears to have been coincidence."

"Explain."

"The broadcast of the ship's codes remains the mystery," Melenis said. "It revealed the existence of the ship to the world at large, but we don't know why it was made. However, I do not believe Vakarian and Sidonis have any underlying motive besides the destruction of the ship. Therefore, they had no reason to make the broadcast, and thus we must assume that either Deus or another party triggered the broadcast."

"My gut says the latter," Sensat said. "It triggered something of a gang war. Perhaps that was an end unto itself."

"The ship is more valuable than almost any such scenario could justify, sir."

"Almost."

Melenis paused again. "...yes, sir."

"It's possible that whoever had the codes at that time made a serious error of judgement," Sensat said. "Hell, it's Omega. It's more than possible, it's likely. Here's how I see it. Deus gives the codes to an underling, trusting them to move the ship, or use it, or whatever he really wants. The underling loses the codes somehow, whether through betrayal or torture. Someone gets them and makes the broadcast, apparently thinking they have more to gain by doing that. They lose the codes. The codes come to Vakarian. He wants to destroy the ship, you say?"

"And to prevent further models from being built."

At that, Sensat chuckled, a rough, low rasp in the back of his throat. "Well, we're united there, at least. But if that's all... then it's just a chain of events that happened to fall one way over another. Either that, or there's a very complicated plan going on that doesn't make any sense. I think the former is more likely."

"Wait, wait, wait," Garrus said, holding up a hand. "_Please_ tell me what's going on. You built the ship, right?"

"Correct."

"Then why don't you want any more built? Why did you build it in the first place? What do you _want?_"

"Right now?" Sensat said. "Right now, I want you to give me the codes to my ship back. Then, I want to kill Deus and destroy all his work."

"Well, I'm not giving you the codes," Garrus said. "I'm not giving anyone the codes. I'm not letting this ship be used. Period. I don't care if you threaten me, torture me, whatever. I'll never give them up."

"How heroic," Sensat remarked. "You and I do share a common goal, you realise? I don't want to see the ADAPT system used any more than you do."

"You fucking built the thing," Sidonis said. "I'm not buying that you don't want to use it."

"We do not have to be enemies, you know," Sensat said. "Let's talk. But not here. Somewhere with chairs." He clicked his fingers. "Let's go to the lounge."

* * *

The door to the lounge was three down on the opposite side of the corridor and looked identical to all the others. However, the difference between the rooms couldn't have been more stark.

The lounge was a classically designed executive room, minimalistically designed; white carpet that matched plain walls, decorated with abstract paintings and the occasional sculpture that only served to make the room feel even less cluttered. They were too far inside the building to have the traditional wall-to-floor window, but the vast fish tank running across one entire wall was a reasonable substitute.

Eight comfortable-looking leather chairs were arranged around a central table done in what looked a lot like real oak, which glimmered gently in the soft white lighting. The whole thing was such a bizarre non-sequitur from the industrial design permeating the rest of the building that Garrus almost laughed at the ridiculousness of it; it was as if someone had ripped a business suite from a five-star hotel and deposited it in the middle of a building site.

A gentle nudge at his back from Melenis spurred him forward, and he took one of the chairs at the table, sinking into it cautiously as Sidonis sat beside him. Erash and Sensat both took chairs as well, sitting facing them from the opposite side of the table with the soft blue glow of the fish tank behind them, but Melenis remained standing by the door. _As if I needed more reminders that we're prisoners here. I've seen this movie. This is the part where the villainous mastermind sits down with the gallant hero over a light dinner and talks about galactic domination or something, then leaves him alone so he can escape and save the day._

_Well, the laws of narrative are on my side, at least._

"Well," Sensat said, spreading his arms, "here we are. We have time to talk."

"They have Vunas," Sidonis said coldly. "Every minute we spend here, they're probably torturing her."

"Yes," Sensat said. "Two outcomes. One, she hands over the information immediately, in which case we are already far too late and she is most likely dead. Two, she resists; asari are very mentally strong, as a people. In that case, we have a few hours at the very least. Regrettable for her, but ultimately an acceptable price."

"Go to hell," Sidonis growled.

The batarian's lips quirked upwards in an ironic smile. "Perhaps. But, while we remain on this plane of existence, I'll speak with you. I feel there is a fundamental misunderstanding here. I am not the monster you seem to think I am."

"Says the guy who designed a weapon for the specific purpose of genocide?" Garrus said.

"Purpose is not action," Sensat said. "I don't deny that that is what I created. However, I object to the implication that I intended it to ever be used."

Garrus blinked. Sensat regarded him coolly for several seconds, waiting to see if he would reply, then steepled two fingers beneath his chin.

"Shall I tell you why I built that ship? Why I spent years on it, perfecting every aspect, designing it to be the ultimate vessel for its size, creating the ADAPT system? Why I innovated more than my entire culture has done in a century?"

"Why?" Garrus said flatly. The batarian was becoming creepier by the second, and it was his equivocal, bland tone that really got to Garrus. _If they rant and rave, you know where you are. You can deal with that. If they're calm..._

"Not because I want to murder millions, or even billions," Sensat said. "Not because I want to make money from it. Not because of some far-fetched political agenda. I didn't want to blackmail the galaxy, or even change it. I created it because, well..."

He leaned forwards, all four eyes shining.

"I did it because I _could_."


	15. Divine Intervention: Allegiance

**DIVINE INTERVENTION**

**EIGHT: ALLEGIANCE**

* * *

"OK," Sidonis said carefully into the ensuing silence, "you do know that's not actually a reason to do something, right?"

"Go on," Sensat said, without anything but genuine curiosity in his voice. "Tell me why."

Sidonis waved an exasperated hand. "That's not a fucking reason! There's thousands of things I could do right now, but that doesn't mean I want to do them! It doesn't mean they're good ideas! I _could_ stab myself in the face, but that's not a reason to do it!"

At that, Garrus glanced over at Erash, who had started to open his mouth for some kind of put-down but had apparently thought better of it. The salarian met his gaze with a bland expression, one obviously designed to give away absolutely nothing.

"The examples aren't analogous," Sensat said calmly. "I feel you misunderstand me, misunderstand what I want. I'll provide a better analogy. Mr. Vakarian."

"Yes?" Garrus said, momentarily taken aback by the attention suddenly focusing on him.

"What do you want from life?"

"What do I-"

"Do not make me repeat myself," Sensat said. "You heard me."

"I- how do you mean?" Garrus said, still off-balance from the question's suddenness.

Sensat sighed, and steepled two long fingers in front of his face instead of under his chin, regarding him with uncomfortable intensity. "Tell me, former-C-Sec-officer-Vakarian, galaxy-saving-commando-Vakarian, what is your goal? You're a fighter, that much is clear. What do you fight for? Assume everything you do goes to plan, current evidence of your capabilities there notwithstanding. What is the result? Is it political change? A resurgent Hierarchy? A unified galaxy? Or perhaps personal wealth? Power?"

"What I want," Garrus said slowly, "is a galaxy free from bastards like you. I want to see you and your kind brought to justice for what you do."

"A just society, then," Sensat mused, seeming not even to notice the insult. "A noble goal, some would say. Hardly a realistic one, of course, but a goal nonetheless. However, it's hardly an uncommon one. Perhaps that speaks to how unattainable it truly is." He touched his fingertips together a few times, letting the pause hang in the air for several seconds before continuing. "And you, former-mercenary-Sidonis? What do you want from life?"

"Me? Man, I've got no idea," Sidonis said. "Not a fuckin' clue, you know? I always kind of assumed you got one later, like, automatically."

"Ideological puberty," Sensat murmured. "An interesting concept. Also, an irrelevance. What you want from life defines you as a person, no? Or perhaps it is the other way around. Perhaps they're too interconnected to tell. Tell me, are you wondering what I want from life?"

"I," Garrus said acidly, "am on the edge of my seat."

"Your fish are dead," Sidonis said.

"What?" Sensat said, a look of confusion coming over his face.

"Your fish," Sidonis said, nodding at the tank the two of them were facing. "They're dead."

Erash and Sensat simultaneously looked around, and Garrus followed their lead. For the first time, he really looked at what he'd assumed to be a fish tank – and saw there were no fish. His gaze travelled downwards to the bottom of the tank, which was lined with sand, small rocks and decomposing fish.

"Ah," Sensat said, turning back to the table. "Correct. They are. Melenis, place an order for some more. And buy some food this time. Fish eat, correct?"

"Yes, sir," Melenis said.

"Never understood the appeal," Sensat said, sounding annoyed. "What's the point? The maintenance is an unwelcome distraction, and all they add is aesthetic in nature."

"You said you wanted a classy lounge," Erash said. "I told you: you need fish. That's just how it works. You can't have class if you don't have fish."

"I will refrain from thinking about that," Sensat said drily, then refocused on Garrus's face. "That aside, I will tell you what I want from life."

"Wait, no, let me guess," Garrus said. "Is it genocide? I bet it's genocide. All the cool kids are doing it."

Sensat blinked all four eyes at once. "No. I don't want destruction. I have always had something of a talent for the opposite, in fact. I have always been a creator. That, I believe, is what sets me apart from you – from all of you. You are, by your nature, destroyers. You've demonstrated this admirably today; your careers are founded on killing, on putting an end to things. Perhaps that's why you were on Omega in the first place. Do you deny it?"

"As much as I'd like to believe your little black-and-white view, that's not true," Garrus said. "You can create through destruction. What you're doing is destroying through creation. It's not so simple."

"Yet you are a soldier – as are most of your kind," Sensat said. "Erash specialises in demolition. Melenis personifies demolition. You kill and destroy and burn what others have erected. I build. That's all I seek. That's all I want from life. I want to create. I want to create things nobody else has ever even thought of. I want to take things that never were and make them, and I _can_. The joy is not in the result but in the process; in going further and doing more than anyone else has. The ship is my, to borrow a phrase, my magnum opus. The technology behind it is fundamentally superior to anything I have ever encountered. You cannot even begin to comprehend what wonders I worked to create it. It's my life's work. It's a triumph of engineering on a scale that nobody has seen in decades, centuries, and it's _mine_. It represents my talents taken to their very limit. It's an achievement I will never be able to top."

"And it's designed specifically for genocide," Garrus said. "That's something of a flaw, I'd say. If that's your life's work, then it wasn't worth it."

The batarian's face froze for half a second, then relaxed ever so slightly. Garrus wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but it probably wasn't exactly _good_.

"You don't understand," Sensat said, after a couple of seconds spent regarding his fingers. "I anticipated as much."

"Did you," Garrus said, deliberately leaving the question mark out. _Petty. But I like petty._

There was another long, long pause, this one going on for upwards of twenty seconds. Sensat was staring past Garrus with the unmistakeable expression of someone deep in thought, while Erash's dark eyes were flitting between the two of them every few seconds, waiting for the next move. Sidonis, to his credit, was staying out of it, and Melenis wasn't the interrupting sort. The wait dragged out longer and longer until Sensat finally seemed to mentally shake himself and return his attention to Garrus.

"You," he said quietly, "have precipitated the endgame of our little dance here by your arrival. Within a day, all this will be over. The only question is who'll still be standing when the dust clears. If anyone. You've given me a fighting chance to put an end to Deus once and for all, the end I now realise he so richly deserves."

"Thank you," Garrus said drily.

"Yes," Sensat replied. "As such, I've elected to explain the situation. In full."

At that, Erash looked sharply around at the batarian, and Garrus noticed that Melenis was staring at him as well. A sudden air of buzzing, anticipatory tension seemed to spill into the air, that almost electric silence you got when every tiny background noise seemed louder than a gunshot. Sensat glanced at them with a curiously blank expression, then abruptly got up from his chair. He let one hand trail along the surface of the table as he walked around to its head, where he stopped, facing all four of them. He leaned forwards onto the polished surface, both palms flat on it.

"What you know," he began, "is limited. That applies to all four of you. More so to the newcomers, but I've kept you-" he nodded at Melenis and Erash, "-in the dark in many areas as well. It was a necessity, I know you will understand that, but events are moving towards a close faster than I had imagined. I believe the time has come for the whole affair to be illuminated as much as possible for all concerned before the final moves are made."

He let that sink in for a few seconds before continuing, still wearing that guarded, neutral expression. A glance across at Erash confirmed for Garrus that he was almost scarily intent on the batarian's every word, and in that moment he knew that the salarian had been telling the truth; he really didn't know exactly what was happening, and he had as much riding on it as he and Sidonis did.

"This goes back longer than I'd told anyone," Sensat said. "It began approximately eight years ago, although of course the seeds had been there longer. But that was when things began to move. That was when I met a turian named Jullan. As I understand it, it's a common first name among turians, so it was hardly any help in identifying him further. He now goes exclusively by the name 'Deus', though he used that back then as well, a form of alias."

He paused, and closed his eyes for a second.

"We met," he went on, "here on Deinech. At the time, I was a technician in the employ of the Zuviel cartel, assigned to their alleged R&D division. It was about the best post I could hope for on the planet, which is to say that it was dull, limited and slow. I could do so much more, and I knew it. Several other people had noticed it, as well. I became a prominent poaching target for a time, but I had no interest in moving to another such position. The difference would barely have been measurable. So, I continued to work away on gunships and weaponry and armour when I could have been heading research in a Citadel tech lab. That didn't appeal to me enormously either, but it would have been better, at least. They'd never take a batarian, of course, but that was inevitable.

"I was approached one day by Deus. Even then he was successful, greatly so. I never found out how he made his money; he was always very, very careful to hide his assets from me. My assumption was that he ran a major corporation of some sort, because that was the level of power he was pulling, but I never knew which. I didn't care. What he offered me that day was everything I had ever wanted and more.

"I was naïve. When he offered me the chance to personally run a bleeding-edge development project, I naturally jumped at the chance. I still would have. He explained to me that this would be a technological undertaking of previously unknown proportion, especially for one person. He told me it would almost certainly prove impossible, but he was willing to fund it for as long as it took. He showed me some figures and engineering samples he'd acquired from the Shadow Broker; useless on their own, but with the right mind applied to it, limitless. He explained to me that he was funding this only for the joy of creating, that he would sell off minor parts of the final product – not enough that any buyer would be able to work out exactly what it was we were building or do anything with it themselves – to fund further research, on more supposedly impossible ideas. He told me that what he wanted was for my potential, and the potential of the technology he had acquired and that which he envisioned, to be fulfilled. And he was offering me total control over what I made. As I said, I was naïve. It was too good to be true, but I was young. Very young. At the time, I'd just turned nineteen."

Garrus started slightly at that, and looked up at Sensat more closely than he'd done before. It was true that his face was fairly youthful, but you never could tell easily with batarians. C_an he really be that young? I thought he was older than I was..._

"No degree," Sensat went on, as if anticipating the inevitable question. "I didn't even finish school, technically. By fifteen, I was better than every one of them at a field they'd been working on for their entire lives. I was _better_. Deus told me he understood that. And from what he told me, I thought I'd found a kindred spirit. Of course, he was manipulating me from the start. He'd clearly done some serious psychological research into me, figuring out what makes me tick, so to speak. He played me absolutely perfectly, although at that age he probably didn't need to. So, I quit the Zuriel cartel – which was not exactly simple, because I was their most valuable unit of personnel in Valac – and went with him, to create. I worked alone, of course, although he spent a great deal of time with me, studying what I had done so far. Offering encouragement. Using anyone else would have been unacceptable. All I had was a handful of synthetic assistants I'd designed, but I did all the intellectual weightlifting, while Deus watched.

"He told me we needed to go small. He was right, I suppose. Miniaturisation has been taken to the point where you need a truly incredible leap to go any further, even post-geth. That's what appealed to me, of course; that it was essentially impossible. That's why I did it. I used the basic technology from the samples Deus had acquired, and from there I was able to compress further and deeper than anyone had ever done before. I was driven. I wanted to create something that could do anything, and it was Deus who told me that the only way to demonstrate mastery of something was to demonstrate its potential to kill. Doubtless, you see where this is going. I was so grateful to him for granting me this opportunity, so happy that I had a free hand to push the boundaries further than they had ever gone, that I didn't notice. For the first few months, I was somewhat aimless, casting around for some great project. But Deus knew what he wanted from me, and he played me brilliantly. Looking back, I can see the ways he suggested it to me, the ways he persuaded me and tricked me into creating a weapon, but at the time it all made perfect sense. I began to create the ship.

"It took years. As expected. A regular research division would have had it done much faster – _if_ they'd been able to keep up mentally, which I doubt. But alone, it was slow, methodical. I took the technology apart and put it back together again dozens of times, looking for absolute efficiency and lethality. I wanted the best I could possibly do, and I would accept nothing else. And all this time, Deus was drawing his own plans. After a few years, he'd dropped his original name entirely. He told me he disliked the Hierarchy, which is probably true enough, and this was his way of breaking from them. At the time, I didn't understand the root of the name he'd chosen for himself. The translator didn't include such an old, obscure language, and the name sounded turian anyway. I didn't suspect a thing. I merely kept working.

"I found you two within a couple of months of each other," and here Sensat nodded towards Erash and Melenis again, "which was about three years ago now. Both on Omega, while I was taking a sabbatical of a few months after stalling on a particularly difficult issue. Erash was a security consultant with Eclipse, and Melenis had been a writer. Of course, he was still entirely volus then. When I met him, there was very little left functional beside the head. He was alone. I took him. Rebuilt him. I had the technology. I took them along because I was beginning to get an inkling of just what Deus was truly planning. I wanted people on my own side, answerable only to me. I started to siphon off funds from the ship's construction, which was easy enough; I'd always been experimental in my approach, which left not only a great deal of extremely expensive equipment unused but also enormous monetary leeway, and Deus would never question where it had gone because he still thought I was entirely with him. I set up several bases using the money and the allies, including this one and the one that Deus has apparently destroyed. However, he never knew about them or about Erash and Melenis until things came to a head.

"Deus was... decaying." A note of... _something_ entered the batarian's voice here, something Garrus initially mistook for doubt. It wasn't, though, it was something somehow more than just that, something deeper that he couldn't trace. "Over the years, I noticed. He very rarely acted any differently to normal, but I could tell. It was in the way he referred to himself, the way he referred to me and the ship, to our greater aims. He'd always talked about it being a 'great work'. One day, he referred to it as an 'opus Dei', perhaps something he had not meant to let slip in front of me. I was interested, so I later looked it up. That was when I translated his name, and that was when I began to worry. Deus was always controlling, to a certain extent. He let me have what I thought was free reign because I needed it to function fully, and he understood that. I was beginning to realise, however, just how manipulated I had been. Again, he'd always seemed to think highly of himself. Perhaps I felt that much was fair; he was clearly a powerful, wealthy, intelligent man. But he started to surround himself with people who were more than just cronies, and in those few instances in which I ventured outside the laboratory, often to confer with him, I could see them for what they were.

"They weren't corporate yes-men, or even loyal bodyguards. It went further. Deeper. He had chosen wisely. They were like a cult; utterly devoted to him in every way possible. I'd imagine there was some kind of conditioning or brainwashing involved at some point, or perhaps drugs, but whatever the result he had begun to form what was looking oddly like a religion around himself. I understand you recently had the pleasure of meeting some of them." A mirthless smile crept across the batarian's lips, slow and cold. "Perhaps you noticed how singularly devoted to their task they were. In any case, I was beginning to feel perturbed. The ship was nearing the specifications I had been aiming for, and the ADAPT system was entirely complete, but I was harbouring grave doubts as to whether Deus had been telling me the truth about his intentions."

Sensat paused, and looked down at his hands again. Garrus was still riveted on him, and the utter silence in the room told him all three of the others were as well.

"It was when the geth came that he... snapped," he went on, after perhaps ten seconds of silence. "They were repelled, of course, as you know well, Mr. Vakarian, but just how close we had come to losing everything shook him to the core. I believe it reminded him of his own limitations. _Memento mori_, as he might have quoted himself. And that was when he began to act more and more unstably. I realised I had been trapped, in essence. I had poured my entire being into that ship for over seven years, and I simply could not leave it, no matter how much I doubted. And it was so close to completion..."

He trailed off, and there was another agonising pause, this one going on for at least half a minute before Sensat finally spoke again.

"I had installed my single-holder code system several years earlier. I was the only person with access. But when I told Deus the ship was essentially complete, he asked for me to turn it over temporarily so that he might inspect it. I had not yet entirely lost faith in him, and he had several prominent armed guards. What was I to do but turn them over? I did not anticipate that he would simply take them and throw me aside, so I allowed him access in my place. Contrary to anticipations, he did exactly that. He took the ship, had me thrown into a cell a couple of levels down, and that should have been the end of that if he hadn't been becoming increasingly careless.

"You see, merely because I did notanticipate that he _would_ betray me at a second's notice did not mean that I did not anticipate that he _could_. I had prepared a contingency plan for exactly that case, and my own preparations were in place. Melenis and Erash both believed I was dead, which was only natural. They were aware that Deus had moved the ship offworld, although they didn't know where he'd taken it or why. They couldn't make contact with me. It was a reasonable assumption. It was wrong.

"The full story is too long to tell you, but I knew enough of Deus's base's security to make an escape. I had already built in various programming overrides into the systems, placed certain charges in strategic locations, concealed weapons. It was simple, precisely because I knew exactly what I would have to do. Deus was offworld at the time, unfortunately, but when I made my exit, I made absolutely certain that everyone in that base was dead. It was completely destroyed, but I knew he had others, just as I did. And that launched the current phase of events, this occurring approximately three months ago."

"And that's where we came in," Garrus said, more to show that he was listening than for anything else. He hadn't quite reached the point where he could have an emotional reaction to all of this, so he settled for simple comprehension before it finally kicked in.

"Yes," Sensat said slowly. "Melenis and Erash, as I said, believed I was dead. They remained under that impression for over two months, which was a necessary move on my part to ensure Deus could not track me down. I believed he would eventually move the ship back to Deinech with the use of the orbital docks, so I set out to hack them. I'm surprised nobody had ever done it before. It wasn't particularly difficult, if a little time-consuming. And then, I waited. Melenis and Erash moved on, and began contract work for a time, working out of the base you came from, while I remained here. They didn't think to come here, as I expected, and my patience was rewarded soon enough. The ship resurfaced on Omega with the destruction of Vult and the broadcast of the specifications, and I became certain it would return here. Even when it was reported destroyed, I maintained my watch, and then you dropped neatly into my hands. I contacted Erash and Melenis to reveal that I was still alive, I told them about the ship's return and dispatched them to ambush whoever had the codes – my assumption was Deus, but that was not certain. Of course, it was you. And now... here we are."

The last sentence seemed to hang in the air for a few seconds, then faded away into utter silence, deep and contemplative. Garrus thought back through that last frantic day, dredging up every word he could remember being said to him, and blinked in amazement. _It all makes sense. Every bit of it fits into what happened, what we've been told... so that must be the truth. Unless it's all a trick to get me to hand over the codes, but I doubt that. There's no way they'd be able to do all of this unless that were all true._

_And I still don't really know what's going on._

"So," Sensat said, the noise so jarring that Garrus almost started out of his seat. "That's how I spent my last few years. That is the situation. And there remain only a few points in doubt. One: where is Deus? Two: what is his ultimate goal? Three: what exactly happened between Deus taking the codes from me and their fall into your hands?"

"Can't help you with any of 'em, man," Sidonis said. "You're the super-fucking-genius around here. You tell me."

"I believe you've already lent some aid in the first point," Sensat said, fixing four beady eyes on Sidonis. "Deus was always extremely careful never to disclose exactly where his money came from. I could never track him. But with the data from the feeder you contacted-"

"Vunas," Sidonis said coldly. "She has a name."

The batarian cocked his head at him, as if he hadn't understood. "Yes. She does. And she linked the Emendus family with interest in the ship. This is my only lead on Deus, if it is indeed a lead. Her abduction complicates matters, though even if she were to crack it would probably take several hours for Deus to locate the ship again. If not, then the problem is non-existent. You know her, do you not? How strong is she?"

Sidonis went very still and calm before he spoke. "She can take anything."

"Anything?" Sensat queried.

"_Anything_."

"Well, that's certainly encouraging, if vague," Sensat said thoughtfully. "Still, time should not be wasted. We must determine where we stand. If you were not turians, we would not suspect you of being in league with Deus, you understand; his personal clique is entirely composed of them. But since you are, I must ask: who do you work for?"

"Myself," Garrus said.

"Uh, him, I guess," Sidonis muttered.

"They are independent," Melenis said, speaking for the first time in several minutes. "No other explanation makes sense."

"Good enough," Sensat said. "There remains the question of just what led to the codes being transferred to Vakarian, but we cannot know that now."

The batarian's eyes flicked sideways in perfect synchronisation to alight on Garrus's face, staring at him with a diamond-hard intensity that made him want to shift guiltily in his seat like a boot camp rookie sitting in the office of a sergeant who knows he's screwed up big-time.

"Vakarian."

"Speaking," Garrus said.

"I propose an alliance."

"An alliance," Garrus said carefully.

Sensat's eyes glittered bright as they remained resolutely fixed on his own. "Yes."

"You built a ship that could kill billions of people," Garrus said. "You had your men kidnap me. You've told me that you want your ship back. Why the hell do you think I would help you?"

"Because there's a great deal at stake," Sensat said simply. "Deus holds all the research I had done over those years. He has schematics. He has plans. He has the technology to reconstruct what I have built, even if in a crude form, and in his hands that will prove devastating. I don't know what he wants, or even if he's rational any more. However, I can promise you that he will absolutely not hesitate to use that technology as a weapon."

"And what were you going to use it as?" Garrus said acidly. "A paperweight? A conversation piece?"

"Again, you misunderstand," Sensat said, and an edge of annoyance crept into his voice. "I never wanted the ship to be used. I recognise that I was wrong to build it, but Deus pulled my strings expertly. I was foolish. That is in the past. We must look to the future. When all this is done, assuming I live through it, the ship will never fly again. However, I will not permit its destruction. It is the pinnacle of my work; a trophy, one might say. Deus was the one who wanted it built in the first place. I don't know why, but his sanity is slipping. Whatever you believe about me, it is imperative that we put a stop to him before he commits or enables others to commit genocide."

"And you care about genocide?" Garrus said sceptically.

"I'm not a monster," Sensat said quietly. "Neither, I suspect, are you. Deus is a different story. I will not let him go, but I can't do that without your help. Either hand over the codes now and walk free, or fight with me. Those are your choices. Well, that or death."

"Good to know death is always an option," Garrus murmured, and rubbed a hand down his face. It hadn't been a long day. It had only been about three or four hours since he'd first woken up, or so he thought, but there'd been enough crammed into them that he felt almost exhausted. _And I'm not going to get any sleep any time soon, am I? Why the hell does everything have to happen so damn fast?_ "Suppose I said yes. What's your plan?"

"Follow our lead," Sensat said. "The Emendus family. That's all we have. Five is better than three, even when one of those three is Melenis."

"Y'know, boss," Erash said, "that's very hurtful to me. I feel unloved."

The batarian snorted. "You know as well as I do that you'd be dead a dozen times over if not for him."

"Eleven times," Erash corrected him. "That business in Buthar doesn't... doesn't count."

"So noted," Sensat said, and returned to his seat. "Shall we begin?"

"Begin? Begin what?" Garrus said.

"We have plans to lay," Sensat told him. "Computer."

"Good afternoon, Mr. Sensat," a cool, neutral female voice said suddenly, making Garrus jump a little. _I hate how VI voices sneak up on you like that._ "How can I-"

"Shut up," Sensat said. "Never speak unless spoken to. I told you that."

"Confirmed, Mr-"

"Shut. Up. Give me a map of the city. Wireframe only. Project onto the table."

The computer didn't speak, to what looked suspiciously like Sensat's relief, but instead dimmed the lights down to a point where there was nothing but a faint, faint glow that cast the room in twilight. Half a second later, Valac appeared.

It didn't take time to render; it just came into being. A billion points of bright white light sparkled in mid-air, woven into lines and edges and corners, some almost too small for the naked eye to pick out and some far larger, forming streets, towers, rough industrial blocks – the entire city. The resolution alone was incredible; the virtual city that was being projected was about two metres on each side, with the very tallest buildings, little more than slender needles at this scale, reaching up no higher than about ten centimetres, but the detail was unbelievably fine, with what looked like perfect replication down to under a metre. Each building wasn't just a few lines next to each other but rather a fully-rendered 3D model composed of thousands upon thousands of minute details, and there were thousands of _those_...

"Computer. Highlight Emendus family holdings in red," Sensat said, his face cast in a ghostly white light by the gleaming city below him. There was an almost imperceptible pause, then hundreds of buildings instantly flashed scarlet, most of them concentrated in one small area towards the south, but there were dozens scattered across the map, including one of the tallest towers in the city, rising thin and red above the skyline.

"Highlight Building B-Nine-Three-U in green."

A single building flickered into green – or, rather, the remnants of a building. It was a fairly small one, by Valac standards, but the entire top half had apparently collapsed, leaving a jagged mess of colourful lines to represent the destruction.

_I think I might just know which one that is._

"So what?" Erash said, peering in at the projection. "What does this do? It's very pretty, but how does it help? Any damn one of those could be what we're looking for. What _are _we looking for?"

"If Deus does indeed have a hand in the Emendus family," Sensat said, "it's not a controlling one. The Emendus leadership is strong. They're not the kind he can control from behind the scenes. I imagine he has a stake, but no more. He's still smart. He'll have limited operations to a couple of buildings only, or perhaps even one. That would make it easier to operate in secret."

"...so?" Sidonis said.

"_So_," Sensat said, with unmistakeable distaste – _can't say I blame him _- "we look for one building that fits our criteria."

"Which are?" Garrus asked.

"Melenis," Sensat said, apparently ignoring him.

"Yes, sir?" the volus said, ambling over to the table.

"Input the time difference between when your trace was intercepted and the arrival of Deus's first skycar into the simulation. Assume top speed and scramble launch."

"Inputting."

Melenis opened his omnitool and keyed in several long strings of numbers, fingers moving faster than seemed plausible. On the map, a bright gold ring appeared, surrounding the green building like it was a bullseye. _Which it was, I suppose. _It left quite a few blocks the usual white directly around the building, only turning gold to encompass another few after them and then switching back to white after that. There was exactly one red building within the ring, but it was tiny; barely six storeys tall and still remarkably narrow.

"Identify," Sensat said.

"Daserix Sisters Accounting, Ltd," the computer answered.

"I don't think that's what we're looking for," Garrus said thoughtfully.

"You may be right," Sensat agreed. "Computer. Identify shell companies contained within Emendus holdings."

"Identified. There are six hundred and fifty."

"How many occupy whole buildings?"

"Thirty-nine."

"Highlight in blue."

Thirty-nine bright blue buildings shone, laid out across the city but concentrated with the main cluster of reds in the south. However, that wasn't what drew the eye.

"Now," Sidonis said, "that's interesting."

"That _is _interesting," Erash murmured.

One of the blue buildings was located almost exactly in the middle of the golden ring to the west of the green bullseye. More than that, it was large; it was fully forty-odd storeys tall and stretched across a lot of the block, one big fat blue block that stood out like a sore thumb; every other building highlighted in blue was far, far smaller, rarely reaching ten storeys and never even coming close to that kind of size.

"Identify," Sensat said calmly.

"Cairo Investments," the computer said.

"Describe their business in two words."

"Extremely limited."

"That," Garrus said, "seems a little excessive for an 'investment company'."

"That it does, Vakarian," Sensat said, and a bright blue spark seemed to dance in all four of his eyes as he fixed them on the building. "That it does. I believe we may have our next target."

"We cannot confirm," Melenis cautioned.

"Yes we can," Sensat said dismissively. "We'll simply do it in person. By which I mean _you'll_ simply do it in person. Arm up."

"As you say, sir," Melenis said, and turned on his heel to leave the lounge. Erash threw one more glance at the glimmering hologram spread across the table, then followed him out.

"Computer, end simulation. You'll notice, Vakarian," Sensat said, as the city vanished as suddenly as it had appeared and the lights faded back up, "that I'm alone. I have no doubt you could kill me if you wanted to, even without weaponry. I want you to know that I trust you will do the right thing."

"The right thing being working for you," Garrus said.

"In this case, yes."

"You know," Garrus said, rubbing his chin, "some might consider my killing you being the right thing."

"Then _some_," Sensat said, leaning forwards, "have a very short-term view of right and wrong, don't you think?"

_Dammit. He's right. I hate it when people who aren't me are right._

Garrus sighed, and sat back. "I really don't have a choice, do I?"

"There's always a choice," Sensat said. "Maybe it's not entirely clear which option is right and which is wrong, but the choice remains. You know that."

Garrus exhaled deeply, and closed his eyes for a moment before responding. "Yeah. I do."

"And your choice, Garrus?"

Garrus quirked one side of his mouth at the use of his praenomen. "As I said. I don't have a choice."

"I'm glad we understand one another," Sensat said, offering a thin, humourless smile. "And you, Lantar?"

"Just Sidonis, if it's all the same to you," Sidonis said diffidently, and stretched as he rose from his chair. "But I _really _don't have a choice. I'm just along for the ride with you wonderful people, wondering just how I'll get fucked over next. It's fun."

"So noted." Sensat got up as well, and slid his chair back underneath the table. "I suggest we start the ride, then."

"Funny thing about rides," Garrus said, and followed suit. "You never do seem to know when they'll stop, do you?"


	16. Divine Intervention: Ride

**DIVINE INTERVENTION**

**NINE: RIDE**

* * *

_So far today, I have been in seven different vehicles._

_One was a taxi that overcharged me. One was a starship designed to kill billions of people. Two were cars used to abduct me, one of which was later blown up. Two were cars used to attack me, one of which was later blown up._

_So, what are the odds that this one's going to survive the day?_

They'd picked a new car from the garage, a sleek DFR model chosen specifically not to look out of place in Valac's skies. It didn't seem obvious why they'd switched from the last one, which had apparently been selected for exactly the same reason, but he was willing to go along with it. For a start, this one had enough legroom for someone in heavy armour to stretch out properly, which was a remarkably uncommon trait among civilian production skycars, and his legs welcomed the rest. The armoury back at Sensat's base had been equipped with enough stimulants to keep him on his feet for about six years, but the ones he'd taken didn't do anything to ease the aches starting to flare up in his battered body, and he was uncomfortably aware that he was probably going to be doing a lot of running over the next few hours. _Of course, that assumes my survival, so there's a plus._

He and Sidonis were, as usual, occupying the back seats of the car, while Melenis and Erash sat up front - Sensat had stayed behind to offer mission control, which didn't seem particularly helpful, but at least wasn't actively harmful – with little to do but watch the rain trickle down the windows as the car chugged along through heavy traffic. Sensat had insisted that they attract no unnecessary attention, which meant strict adherence to local traffic laws which in turn meant a journey of upwards of twenty minutes. Garrus spent his time checking over his equipment and familiarising himself with its functions; he'd opted for a neatly crafted Kassa scope rifle that was somewhat similar to ones he'd had experience with before, backed up by a Vhian assault rifle in a triple-shot configuration, but neither were wholly familiar to him, and he tried to get a feel for them before he'd actually have to shoot them. The armoury back at the base – _weird how easily I can think that phrase now, probably not a good sign –_ hadn't been anywhere near as extensive as the one Melenis and Erash had been keeping, most likely because Sensat had far less need for weapons than the two of them did, but what was there had largely been fairly high-quality. Sidonis had taken a classic Haliat assault rifle and a Carnifex pistol, while Erash had taken a pair of heavy pistols of a make he didn't recognise. Melenis had a pair of mean-looking shotguns clipped to his back as well as what looked like something between a pistol and a full-blown rifle on his hip, looking comically large against his small stature. Of course, there would probably come a point where it looked comically _small_ next to him, but it still wasn't exactly discreet. _At least it's better than a damn pulse cannon._

His guns weren't the only thing he was struggling to get to grips with, either. After he double-checked the feed on his Kassa for what seemed like the fiftieth time and clipped it onto the back of his armour again, his hand came up automatically to fiddle with the new visor hanging in front of his eye. The last one he'd had was currently lying in pieces on the blood-soaked floor of a bar in Omega, but there'd been a rack full of various models in Sensat's armoury and the opportunity had just been too good to pass up. The one he'd picked had been the only one designed for a turian, a variant on the standard Kuwashii frame capable of the usual magnification and targeting solutions; it was a nice model, but it didn't quite fit flush to the side of his head, and he found himself forever adjusting it slightly. The blue HUD seemed to be more or less in order from what he'd seen so far, and he had to admit it felt good to fill the spot he'd been acutely aware was empty for the last two weeks, but he was equally sure that he was going to have to do some serious customisation later on.

_Although, that also assumes I live to the point where I _get_ a 'later on'. Still, not exactly any point in planning as if I'm going to die. That's probably not conducive to a good combat mindset._

What _was_ conducive to a good combat mindset, though, was the fact that the audio link installed in the visor was capable of playing music at a moment's request, and he spent a few silent minutes weighing up a playlist. It was frowned on by official Hierarchy military policy, seen as a potentially dangerous distraction, but he'd always liked surreptitiously piping music to the inside of his helmet in mid-firefight. He found it tended to help him relax, which in turn let him think more lucidly on the fly when the gunshots weren't the only thing he could hear, and any concerns about communication difficulties were alleviated by the fact that the link automatically faded down if anyone tried to buzz him. And, joy of joys, there was a damn kill-counter he could turn on. _It's the little things in life..._

It was the litany of minor calibrations and configurations he was working on as part of his usual pre-combat routine that usually helped him tune out unnecessary distractions, but it wasn't doing everything he'd wanted it to this time. Normally, he'd have complete confidence in whatever he was about to do or at least in the reasons he was doing it for, but working with Sensat was a very different prospect to working with Shepard. Shepard's missions had always been absolutely justified – _let's face it, I'd have done just about anything to get my hands on Saren – _but this was murkier. There was room for doubt, and that doubt was still gnawing at him. Sensat's explanations had made a lot of sense, but there was no way, _no_ way he could take him at his word – _and I have the feeling he still hasn't told us the whole truth -_ and Melenis and Erash didn't seem wholly trustworthy to him either. For that matter, he didn't entirely trust Sidonis yet. But they were a team now, whether he liked it or not, and he couldn't deny that their mission was too important for them to fail. He just wished things had been simpler, that he'd known exactly what they were doing or what their enemies knew or wanted, but that was a luxury you didn't see often. _Everything seemed so damn simple under Shepard. It was all so black and white, us and them... now I've got nothing but grey and I'm not really sure who's 'us' and who's 'them'. Or even if there is an 'us'. Melenis and Erash will do what Sensat tells them, true enough, but I don't think they like working with other people. He tells them we're all one big, happy, gun-toting family and they've got no choice but to go along with it, but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll like it._

_And then there's Vunas..._

He realised his mind was starting to wander and went back to configuring his visor with ferocious concentration, but Vunas's face was still hovering in his mind's eye, staring reproachfully at him. Blaming him. _I'll do everything I can to help you_, he promised to both her and himself, but all he got back was silence. _Well, I guess I shouldn't expect anything more. Then again, my own mind has been known to have some pretty fierce arguments with itself._

"I have some information for you," Sensat said into his ear, and Garrus jerked up in surprise at the sudden appearance of the voice in his earpiece. "I've identified the building as a former stronghold of the Rovik family, one of their central properties. It fell to use by DiamondEye briefly following the Rovik collapse before the Emendus family bought it through a minor investment group. I have a basic floor plan, but be warned: it's three years old, and it may well be out of date."

A miniature envelope icon blinked white in the top corner of his HUD, and the sensors in the visor read the focus of his eye as the command to open it. A complicated wire model of white lines spiralled outwards, settling into a blueprint for the building's interior. It looked fairly usual for a building of that size, divided into the standard selection of corridors, offices and miscellaneous larger rooms, but that wasn't anything to be certain about. _They have to have some kind of hangar or garage in there, and by the numbers that they threw at us, I'm guessing that it'd probably be a large one. That's not here,so there must have been fairly significant alterations done after this was __made. That's going to make things harder._

_Unless this is just the wrong building, and we're about to burst in on a legitimate investment group. That would be... interesting, certainly._

"I'm not a soldier," Sensat said in his ear, "so I'll leave it to you to interpret it. How will you approach the building?"

"The security will not permit us to make an unobserved entry," Melenis said, "unless it's inexplicably poor. Therefore, any entrance we use will have the same result: that our presence is known."

"And we have to be expected, don't we?" Erash said. "After what we did to their, ah, their fleet, they're going to be mightily paranoid."

"Correct," Sensat affirmed. "Your ultimate goal is to discover Deus's true location, unless he's actually there – which is almost certainly not true, of course. That means you'll need access to important computer systems, and their likely location is the upper floors. A rooftop entry may be advisable."

"That's true," Garrus said. "We go in through the front door, they're alerted off the bat and they'll probably lock down the elevators, which leaves us a whole lot of stairs to climb, most likely under fire. Plus we wouldn't have as far to go if we came in from above, and we might just have the element of surprise."

"I wouldn't say we'll have that," Erash said, without looking back, "but I agree it's our best bet. Are we assuming they have no vehicles left?"

"Potentially," Sensat said, "but it's not certain. What is certain is that you've put a serious dent in the manpower they can muster, so the odds against you will not be overwhelming. I hope."

"Well," Sidonis muttered, "that's very fucking encouraging. What's the next item in your little pep-talk? 'Your guns work... hopefully'?"

"No," Sensat said simply. "I'll leave the tactics involved to you, but I will be watching the skies for anything that looks sinister. In addition, I can help with any hacking you need done, but I can't offer a great deal more. From here on in, you're essentially on your own."

"Understood," Melenis said. "We'll make it quick."

"See that you do," Sensat answered, "for your sakes as much as mine. Out."

The transmission cut off, and Garrus leaned back into his comfortable leather seat. _Well, that's that. All that's left now is what I do best: fight against the enormous odds of an insane turian's private army with a team of quirky specialists in order to save billions of lives._

_Quite a specific job description, really._

"There is," Melenis announced, "what looks like an executive office in the plans on the thirty-seventh floor, two below the top."

"What's above that?" Sidonis asked.

"Maintenance, in all probability," Melenis said. "The division of the rooms indicates that it's not an enormously important section of the building."

"So," Garrus said, scrutinising the plans closely, "we go in through the doorway on the roof after we've landed, head down to the top floor, then... we go left to the side stairwell, head down two floors..."

On closer inspection, the stairwell marked on the map was on the opposite side of the building from the large office Melenis had marked out as their destination. That left them an awfully long trip down what looked like a single central hallway, which neatly bisected the entire floor. _That could prove problematic, especially if we're under heavy fire. On the other hand, there's nowhere for them to hide. Not as if we have any other choice, though._

"Yes," the volus said. "We will need to move quickly to avoid being pinned down. We cannot waste any time."

"We're coming up on the building now," Erash said, and peeled the car out of the traffic line. Garrus looked ahead through the window and caught sight of the towering yet oddly squat structure a few hundred metres ahead, still slightly fudged by the constant rain. It looked strangely like a stone fortress out of the years before turians had reached the stars, ugly and forbidding as it sat there, waiting for them. It didn't exactly fill him with confidence. "I'll put us down right next to the door," the salarian went on, "so get ready. Odds are they'll know we're here already."

To his left, Sidonis slid the pistol he'd been inspecting back into its holster and stretched slightly, readying himself for the next few minutes. "Well," he said, glancing across at Garrus, "this should be fun."

The car touched down on the flat grey surface of the roof and the doors hissed upwards. Garrus's side of the car was facing away from the miniature raised structure that housed the door to the roof, so by the time he'd jumped out into the cool rain and made it around the side, Erash was already at the door, pressing something into the lock. He stepped back and keyed a brief command into his omnitool, and the lock shattered in a brilliant flash of light that left a venomous purple stain on Garrus's retinas for a few seconds. Melenis, already reconfiguring into his 'kill everything' mode, shouldered through it, followed closely by Erash and Sidonis with Garrus taking the rear.

Inside the door was, as they'd expected, a small stairwell done in a fetching shade of gun-metal grey, and they barrelled down it and into the top floor past its bottom. As Melenis wrenched the door to it aside, a loud, urgent alarm began to sound short bursts of a high-pitched tone, spilling from miniature speakers set into the wall.

_Well, they know we're here. At least that means this is the right place. 'Right' being synonymous with 'dangerous'._

They ran down the deserted corridor to the left, covering the fifty metres or so to the stairwell at the side in about seven seconds. The scenery confirmed it was nothing but maintenance on the floor; exposed wires and worn, disintegrating plating covered the walls, while the floor was covered in a mouldy wet stain doubtless acquired from years of being directly under the Deinech climate. Melenis was leading, but he was obviously pacing himself at least a little as they took the stairs down three at a time, almost certainly because he could have outpaced them hugely if he'd really been gunning it.

Sirens blaring around them, they descended two floors, still without seeing a soul, and crashed through the next door and into the thirty-seventh floor of the building.

Garrus had been drawing his sniper rifle from his back as he'd leapt the last few stairs, and brought it up to his shoulder in one smooth motion as he followed Sidonis through the door, scanning the vast corridor ahead of them for threats.

The building's interior design was a lot more pleasant than its exterior and maintenance areas would have led him to believe. The floor was a smooth blood-blue carpet – and a detached, ironic part of his mind noted that would mean it wouldn't be too badly ruined by the events of the next few minutes – while the walls were a bland, non-threatening beige, occasionally dotted by old-style wooden doors and electronic art displays that doubled as consoles. The whole room was simply enormous, stretching straight away ahead of them all the way across the building, intersected at the centre by another perpendicular corridor about a hundred and fifty metres ahead of them. It had to be three hundred metres total in length and maybe ten wide; in essence, it was a perfect killzone, and their destination was right at the other end.

_And guess who's the only one with a sniper rifle._

"Let me take point," he called over the howl of the alarm. "I've got the range!"

"Agreed," Melenis said, and let him shoulder past to the front, alongside Erash, while the volus, expanded to his full, terrifying size, dropped in behind him.

For about six seconds, they advanced down the corridor as fast as they could while maintaining their defensive formation, at that sort of stiff, brisk jog heavy armour forced you into. Every tactical instinct in Garrus's head was screaming at him that this was A Very Bad Idea, that they were hopelessly exposed, but it wasn't as if they had a choice. He kept his eye glued to his scope and his feet moving, and tried like hell not to think of all the ways an organised enemy could have wiped the floor with them.

But their enemy wasn't organised. Not at first. His first target was almost begging to be dropped, running as he did out from the intersecting corridor without even a look around the corner. He was obviously a turian, in full armour, confused and disoriented by the sudden alarms. His weapon, what looked like an assault rifle, wasn't anywhere near ready to fire, and as he glanced left and right and caught sight of the oncoming invaders, he committed _the_ cardinal sin of combat and froze.

Not for long. It might not have been more than a second he stood there, slowly, slowly bring up his gun, but it was certainly long enough for Garrus's visor to magnify, sharpen and steady his field of view so that his crosshair was delicately hovering over the weaker eye section of the helmet.

_Scoped._

His rifle cracked like a whip, and the unfortunate trooper's brains left the back of his head in a shower of grey and blue.

_And dropped._

As the body slumped sideways and collapsed, a three-digit number blinked in the top left of his HUD.

**001**

He grinned savagely, and flicked his eye onto the icon for music function of his visor. It saw the movement and opened up his playlist, and a split second later the rough, heavy bass beat of Codian's _Hot Dead Hands _began to pound in his ears. A split second after _that_, two more targets emerged from the corridor on the other side, and he opened up again.

He was on the right of Erash, and the unspoken combat instinct between them automatically assigned targets; military doctrine was never to cross fire unless for a specific tactical reason, which left Garrus the one who'd been ahead and Erash the one hot on his heels. His first shot obliterated the turian's kinetic barriers and slammed hard into his chest, staggering him, but the shields had done just enough to slow the projectile before vanishing that it didn't penetrate the heavy armour. It stopped him in his tracks, though, and the second shot that came as close after the first as the firing mechanism of the rifle would allow punched through the armour like paper and made a terrible mess of the body underneath. He was dead from shock even before he hit the ground, and as Garrus swung his scope left to his companion, he saw a spray of grey matter as Erash's pistols spat a flurry of rounds through the shields, helmet and head all at once.

"Good shot," he said.

"Same to you," Erash called back, making his music fade for a second before coming back in full just as viciously distorted keyboards began to wail over the beat, and they ran on.

**002**, his display read.

He'd chosen a semi-automatic rifle for this particular engagement on the grounds that none of Deus's henchmen had had strong kinetic barriers the last time, so fire rate was going to be more important than sheer power, and so far he looked to be spot on. The turians' shields had crumpled effortlessly against the power of the rifle, and he had fully eight shots per clip that he could unleash in five seconds total, and the kinetic barriers wouldn't always be able to even slow the lethally penetrative rounds. In short, if he could hit them, he could take them down.

The alarms, still vaguely audible over the music, suddenly cut off. _Fair enough. The whole building will know what's going on now. No reason to labour the point._

No other targets emerged as they approached the dead bodies and the corner of the intersecting corridor, which made sense. The three they'd seen had probably just been here by chance, with the rest of the defenders on the other floors of the building. That was lucky for them, but they wouldn't be away forever, and they still had to get out again. Once they hit the office, they were essentially trapped; there was no stairway to the roof on that side of the building, and the only way out was straight back down the corridor. It would be... problematic.

But he stuffed that concern away for another time as they came up to the centre of the crossed corridors, and he swung his rifle right and up to cover the huge length of the hall extending away on the side. There was nobody in sight – at first, but as he began to relax, one of the metal doors at the end of it slid open to reveal an elevator full of armoured figures. His HUD flashed and his finger automatically tightened on the trigger, hammering away three shots in the two seconds it took them to cross the ten metre gap. One missed, from what he could see, but one speared through the shields, armour and shoulder of one of them, incapacitating him if not killing him, while the next obliterated the weak throat guard of another despite the slowing effect of the shields, scoring an instant kill.

"Scratch one!" he called in triumph as the stricken troopers staggered and fell respectively, and then they were away and past the deadliest part of the floor.

**003**

"Garrus, switch," Melenis said to him, and he didn't even have to tell him why as he slowed a little to let the volus thunder past. _I've got the best long-range weapon, and the range is only getting longer. Good thinking._

As he adjusted his gait to allow reasonable accuracy while running backwards, his gun came up again as a figure, already over a hundred and seventy metres distant according to his display, emerged through the door they'd come through thirty seconds ago, and his rifle cracked its last two shots. The first was missing, but he was lucky; it was close enough to the trooper for the kinetic barriers to automatically block the shot, draining them of almost all their energy, which left nothing but armour for his next round to penetrate before it smashed though the centre of the chest plate, sending him backwards off his feet and back through the door.

**004**

He released his thermal clip and let it drop, hissing with heat, to the carpet. His left hand snaked down to his belt and up again in a silkily smooth motion before ramming a fresh one into the gun about a second after he'd dropped the first. He was just in time for his visor to lock onto the next target, immobilised by the one he'd just dropped falling back into him, and that delay was all he needed to line up a single, lethal headshot and fire.

**005**

Nobody else came through the door, though he couldn't tell if it was because they'd been the only two close enough to take the stairs or because nobody else wanted to risk it. He let the scope linger on it for a few more seconds as they reached the three-quarter point, then switched it to the side of the corridor he'd seen the elevator open on, waiting for the next target to show up.

This time, they learned. They knew they were up against a sniper, and they were smart enough not to run straight out into the open like idiots. One of them, however, wasn't _quite_ smart enough not to manually look around the corner and present a spectacularly easy headshot to Garrus, who dropped him instantly. He could have done it in his sleep.

**006**

That was enough to keep them in cover. One of them did poke their head around the corner, but it was whipped away a fraction of second faster than Garrus could react, and his shot only splintered the wall behind it. His finger was still tight on the trigger, but not a single target presented itself after that, and they burst through the doors to the office before he even realised they were there. The first he knew of it was when they swung shut in front of him, blocking all view of the corridor, and he killed the music as he looked around.

It was a large office, as he'd expected, but it lacked the lavish touch executives often seemed to like surrounding themselves with. There was a duraplast window spread over much of one wall, looking out over the rainswept city, and in front of that there was a solid, stylishly minimalist metal desk complete with deactivated holographic display and ergonomic chair, but the art collection that seemed almost to be a requirement these days was conspicuous by its absence, the beige walls instead being inlaid with the same screens he'd seen lining the walls of the corridor, though these were blank and dark. The carpet was a rich, luxuriant crimson, deep enough for his foot to sink into it a fair distance, but that was more or less the only concession to anything but utilitarian aesthetics. It was vacant, and it had the feeling of a room nobody used regularly enough to particularly care about it.

Melenis was already at the desk, opening up the desktop systems. "Block the door," he said, without looking up. "We may need to hold out here."

"Block it? What the fuck with?" Sidonis said. "There's nothing in here!"

Melenis paused for a second, then lifted the computer and its display from the desk and set it on the ground before placing one huge foot against the desk and kicking it halfway across the room. Garrus and Sidonis ran forwards to get it and heaved it back towards the door – _damn thing's a hell of a lot heavier than he made it look –_ as a barricade, blocking the double doors from opening and providing a convenient waist-high cover position. _Finally._

Garrus brought his rifle back and rammed its butt against the wooden door on the left. The doors wouldn't open outwards, so he couldn't open them to get a shot, but he had the next best thing. The wood wasn't strong, and it splintered and cracked under the weight of the blow. A second and third opened up a reasonably sized hole at a perfect height to shoot through, and he took aim again.

_Tables have turned now, boys. Now I've got an easily defended position, and you've got one hundred and fifty metres of pure killzone to walk down. Have fun. I know I will._

It had all gone quiet, he realised. His music was off, nobody was firing or running, the alarms had been deactivated; all there was to hear were the quiet electronic sound effects of the computer Melenis was accessing, crouched on the floor behind him, and the sound of his own breathing as he stared down the sights of his rifle.

Seconds dragged out, long and tense. They all knew better than to interrupt Melenis or even say a word between them, leaving nothing but a heavy silence in the air as Garrus watched the corridor. Still nothing – _there!_

A head looked hesistantly around the opposite corner to the one he'd been focusing on, then pulled back immediately. He shifted his scope ten metres to the right and waited.

Sure enough, they took the lack of shots as a sign that they were out of sight, and a handful of figures crept out of cover and started quickly advancing down the corridor towards the double doors. They were far enough away and the doors were of a dark enough wood that they couldn't make out the hole he'd made or his rifle protruding through it, he realised, and so he let them come.

The thermal clip dropped from the rifle, and he slotted in a new one. He'd had shots left in it, but he wanted a full clip for this. They kept coming, now from both corners, until there were maybe nineteen or twenty of them in his sights.

_Idiots._

He let his sights rest on the head of the leading figure for a moment, then fired, and fired again and again, switching targets quickly and smoothly with the help of the visor's targeting aid. The first one went down in a single shot, sending a quick shockwave of panic through the rest as they realised they'd just walked straight into the line of fire, and the next two took three shots between them, but by then the others were in full retreat, blasting hopelessly away down the corridor at a target they couldn't see. Not a single shot even came close to the hole, although a few left burning pockmarks in the wood, but with the last four shots in his clip he took down three more, two with sweetly struck headshots and one with a blast through his back as he tried to run. The rest managed to escape back into cover before he finished reloading, but there were six new bodies lying on the carpet, their blood fading invisibly into the rich blue.

**012**

"Elite guard my ass," he said quietly to Sidonis. "These guys are about as tactically literate as your average krogan, except they don't have anything like the durability."

"How many've you got?" Sidonis hissed back.

"Twelve so far."

Something caught his eye, and his rifle snapped another harsh report.

"Thirteen," he corrected himself, and felt his mouth quirk upwards in a small, satisfied smile. Someone else had just tried to take the stairs, and the price had been their head.

**013**

"Mel, talk to me," Erash said from behind them. "Anything?"

"I am into the main system," Melenis replied. "However, the most sensitive data is behind several layers of encryption. Sensat, do you copy?"

"Talk," the batarian's terse voice said into Garrus's earpiece.

"We have reached an office with a high-level access terminal," Melenis told him. "It is encrypted. Can you help?"

"I know Deus's systems," Sensat said. "It shouldn't be difficult. Patch me in through your systems."

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Let me- hm."

"'Hm'?" Garrus said, without looking back. "'Hm' sounds bad. Is it bad?"

"No," Sensat said slowly, "but it's not good. This might take a few minutes."

"They'll get wise before that," Sidonis warned. "They bring in heavy weapons, it'll be a real bitch to hold them back."

"What're they like now?" Erash said, moving over to crouch behind Garrus and look through the peephole into the corridor.

"Stupid and numerous," Garrus said, "but they won't be either for long."

"The encryption itself isn't that complex, but there are eleven discrete layers. I'll need at least ten minutes to get access to the highest levels of the system," Sensat said. "Can you hold them off for that long?"

"Maybe," Garrus said thoughtfully. "Maybe not."

"Good enough," Sensat said, and cut the link.

There was a moment of silence.

"Well," Sidonis said, "I'm starting to think we probably should have brought more sniper rifles."

"Rule Four," Garrus murmured, scope still glued to his face. "You can never have enough snipers."

"Yes, you would say that," Erash said.

"You all laughed at me," Garrus went on. "'Garrus,' you said, 'why are you bringing a sniper rifle? We're going to be fighting in small, closed spaces. Bring a shotgun, or some pistols. You'll never need a sniper.'"

"Yes, yes, you've made your point," Erash said testily.

An armoured figure dashed out from cover in an attempt to make it across to the other side. It was a supremely stupid move even by the standards of what had gone before, and Garrus dropped him with two shots before he'd even got halfway. It might have worked if not for the visor, which had instantly given him a firing solution and tracked the target so closely that it had felt like the distance was barely twenty metres. As it was, there was another burst of fine blue blood, and another body hit the floor.

**014**

"No," he said, and reloaded. "_Now_ I've made my point."

The link back to Sensat reopened with a quiet electronic tone. "I have access to the basic levels," the batarian said. "Melenis. Look through the unlocked data for anything useful."

"Yes, sir."

About thirty or forty seconds slowly ticked by in silence. Garrus was afraid even to blink, but nobody made a move in front of him. _Perhaps they've actually learned._

An air of heavy tension was beginning to settle in the room. Melenis was still crouched on the floor, sorting through the computer's files, but Erash and Sidonis had nothing to do, and he could hear them pacing and fidgeting behind him as he glared down his scope. He knew the feeling, that familiar sense of mingled anticipation and dread you got just before a particularly risky mission. _Of course, there are ways of working that off..._

Finally, Melenis broke the silence.

"I have access to some unencrypted internal conversations," he said, as calmly as ever. "They make reference to an asari prisoner brought in earlier today."

Garrus stiffened at that and, despite his concentration, glanced around in surprise. Sidonis was staring at the volus, eyes suddenly gleaming.

"You mean-"

"Yes," Melenis said. "They are holding Vunas Deniaya here."

"Where?" Sidonis demanded. "We've got to get her out of here!"

"One moment." Melenis scrolled through some more files, seemingly touching random parts of the display, before switching to his omnitool and firing off a rapid series of commands. The white messaging symbol in Garrus's visor blinked again, and the file opened to reveal a new, updated floorplan of the building. It was essentially the same as the older one, but there were a few differences in the layout of the lower areas – most notably, a large hangar area that had been carved into the east side of the middle floors. One section on the eighth floor was highlighted in white, a handful of small rooms inside a network of narrow corridors. "She is being held there," the volus went on, "in a holding cell."

"So we break her out," Sidonis said.

Erash glanced at the image on his omnitool. "It's a long way away," he said doubtfully. "It'll make it easy for them to isolate us and damn hard to fight out way out again."

"I don't care," Sidonis insisted. "We have to-"

"We can split up," Melenis said, interrupting. "Erash, Sidonis – you can go down there to retrieve her while Garrus and I hold them off here."

"Fuck that," Erash said. "I'm staying here. Do we even need her?"

"Yes," Sidonis said, in a voice that could have frozen hydrogen.

"Look, I'll go," Garrus said, stepping back from the door. "You two stay here; me and Sidonis can handle this."

"You have the only long-range weapon," Melenis pointed out.

Garrus glanced down at the sniper rifle in his hands, shrugged, and tossed it to Erash, who caught it easily. "Problem solved," he said, and drew his assault rifle. "Now, how do we get there?"

"We can't go out the way we came in," Sidonis said. "They'll fuck us up big-time."

"Here," Erash said, and moved over to a clear patch of carpet. He knelt down and removed a capsule about the size of his fist from his belt, cracking open the smooth metal casing to reveal a hunk of malleable off-white paste, of about the consistency of dough. It spread out as he pushed it into the floor, until it was covering a rough circle of a diameter of maybe fifteen centimetres.

"You may," he said, straightening up and backing away, "want to cover your ears."

Garrus ducked down behind the desk and clasped his hands to the sides of his head, then waited. After a couple of seconds, he began to wonder if it was going to work at all. Then, all of s udden, it did.

Even through his hands, the explosion was brutally loud, a harsh, cracking boom that blew a thin cloud of dust and smoke up into the room. It had flashed brightly enough to briefly light the room up, but as the dust cleared and Garrus extricated himself from his cover, grabbing his gun from the floor, he saw that the explosion had opened up a gaping hole. It was a good metre across in each direction, the edges jagged and still glowing from the sudden heat.

Sidonis sauntered over and looked down into the room below.

"I guess that works," he said, and jumped down. He landed with a heavy thump, then straightened and raised his assault rifle to his shoulder. "Coming?" he called, looking back up at Garrus.

"Do we have any kind of plan for meeting back up?" Garrus asked Erash, who was moving over to cover the corridor again.

"Not really," Erash said, without turning. "Try shooting your way out. Mix things up a little."

"Right," Garrus said absently, and dropped into the room below. The landing was heavy with the thick armour he was encased in adding to his weight, but the drop hadn't been anything more than a couple of metres, and the carpet had been thick enough to cushion the blow somewhat.

As he stood up, he glanced around the office; this one was more traditional, complete with wooden desk, faux old-style bookcases, tasteless potted plant and what looked like a minibar. His visor was still displaying the map of the building, and he marked out their destination with a signpost flag. Immediately, the map minimised away and a green line superimposed itself over that eye, tracing along the floor of the office and out into the corridor._ Hm. Convenient._

"Well," Sidonis said, strolling past him towards the door, "we're two guys with guns, versus an entire private army, on their home turf. Odds?"

"Oh, not high," Garrus said, and started up his playlist again. The familiar crashing battle drums of _Die For The Cause_ started up at a volume that was probably several times higher than the recommended setting. "Not high at all. I wouldn't say there's much chance to survive."

Sidonis, with one hand on the handle of the door, cocked an eyebrow. "Not much chance to survive? Don't you think you're being a bit harsh on us?"

"Us?" Garrus said, with a mirthless grin. "I was talking about them."


	17. Divine Intervention: Ashes

**DIVINE INTERVENTION**

**TEN: ASHES

* * *

**

_Empty. One word to describe this whole place. I've killed fourteen people already, and even then it felt... hollow. Like there were only one or two of them. Kind of creepy, really. Of course, on the other hand, that might just be because we've already killed most of the resistance. That would be nice._

The entire floor was empty. Six hundred metres of corridor formed that vast cross, and Garrus and Sidonis were the only souls there. They'd left the occasional snap of rifle fire from Erash behind them as they neared the centre of the cross, and although the distant echoes still bounced dimly down the corridor at their backs every now and again, they were far too quiet to register over the hammering music in his ears.

"Which way?" Sidonis started to ask, but Garrus was already turning left, following the green guide his visor was showing him into another empty stretch of corridor. He was tired, he had to admit that; after all, it had been a long day of being almost constantly attacked from all sides in a situation that seemed to be changing so quickly nobody involved had any idea what was going on, but he found he was able to put the aches in his legs and the gentle throb of his head aside to run as fast as he could even when fresh. The music roaring in his ears seemed almost comically out of place when juxtaposed with the exciting action of running down a long, empty stretch of hallway, but he could _feel_ the adrenalin surging through his body, plastering over pains and complaints all over.

It wouldn't last, and there'd be hell to pay in a few days – _hate to sound like I'm labouring the point, _ his mind murmured drily, _but that does rely on there _being_ a you in a few days –_ when the inevitable wave of all his stored-up pain and exhaustion finally overtook him, but he'd be able to survive in a state of near-perfect combat readiness for maybe fifty hours, with occasional power-naps. It wouldn't be fun, but it would be necessary. It was the kind of situation where the stakes were high enough for him to be simply unable to afford any kind of relaxation, and you never got many of those; usually the Hierarchy had structured its strikes carefully enough that situations never reached this point, and the closest C-Sec came was its devastating fusillades of amour-piercing paperwork, but this was a whole new paradigm. The closest he could recall was that frantic last few hours on Ilos and the Citadel – in fact, he was positive that he'd been prematurely aged at least five or six years by those final battles – but even then he'd been well-rested going in. _Assuming we live, escape, find the data we're looking for... then we still need to bring Deus down. There's no question of hesitating. The momentum is sqaurely with us. He can't even know what's hitting him, not fully, and we must be decimating the forces at his disposal. We can't afford to let him have the time to bring in extra troops or fortify his position any further, or our chances get slimmer still. And that means it has to end as fast as possible. For better or for worse._

_And why do I think best in combat?_

When they came to the grey metal elevator doors set into the far end of that long, empty corridor, he was breathing hard, harder than he would have liked. Running in full armour was never easy, but all too often it was absolutely vital. He pressed the call button and leant against the wall for a moment, watching the vast stretch of hallway on the off-chance that someone would get the wrong floor.

"Seriously, do we have a plan?" Sidonis asked, the transmission fading his music down again.

"I'm telling you, running in and shooting them _is _a plan," Garrus said. "And a damn good one, in these circumstances."

"But-"

"They're flooding the top floor with every man they have in the building. I really, really doubt they'll have left a heavy presence to watch over a prisoner. A few guys at the most, and we're better than these idiots."

"What if they know what she knows, though?" Sidonis said, an unmistakeable note of worry in his voice. "They'll want to keep her, they'll-"

The basic electronic display over the elevator indicating the floor it was on lit up in a bright 36 with a quiet _ding_. Garrus pushed himself away from the wall and stepped in front of the doors, waiting for them to open as the anthem blaring inside his head roared into its third chorus.

They opened. Seven armoured figures stood inside, and although he couldn't see their eyes he had no doubt whatsoever that they were all staring at him.

_Ah, hell._

For maybe a quarter of a second absolutely nobody moved, immobilised by surprise, and then Garrus struck. He'd had his assault rifle almost at the ready, and he brought it up, acting on instinct alone, and rattled off a triple-shot burst. He didn't even have to pick a target. He was barely a metre away from the first one, and from there neither the unfortunate turian's kinetic barriers nor his armour could stand up to the shots, which speared through his heart in a quiet puff of blue blood. He started to slump, and then the world unfroze and his companions started to bring their own guns up, but Garrus was still moving.

Neither side had been expecting it, but Garrus had reacted fastest, and that meant that he was able to jerk his rifle sideways and drop another one before anyone else could do anything. Tactical reflexes were still powering him, and he noted the guns coming to bear against him with a cold dispassion. An out-and-out firefight would probably kill most of them, but also definitely him. The volume of fire would be too great. So, he reasoned, he had to prevent it from becoming a firefight.

He lunged forwards into the elevator, using the still-falling body as a momentary shield, then felt the assault rifle in his hands judder as he got off another burst into someone's midriff, the reports shatteringly loud in the confined space and audible even over the music, then something slammed into his gut. For a handful of milliseconds, he thought it had been a bullet, but he was only winded, and out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of the rifle butt that had pummelled him. He stumbled right, into another trooper, and lashed out instinctively with one vicious, armoured elbow, catching him under the helmet and lifting him backwards off his feet. Back in front of him, another was raising their rifle again, and for another fraction of a second he was staring down the barrel of a gun.

The trooper's helmet crumpled sideways and ruptured in a wet, grey-blue mushroom of fluid as Sidonis's pistol snarled, and Garrus took advantage of the chaos to fire again. He couldn't pick out a target through what seemed like a sea of armour and bodies all around him, but he _thought_ he'd got one – and then a hammer blow to the back of the head sent him sprawling. The pain was intense, filling his head with blinding white light, but his legs were coming up in an instinctive counterattack even as he went down and his left foot smashed into someone's torso. Sidonis was firing again, somewhere out of sight, and the smell of blood grew stronger as something wet splashed down on him as he started to struggle to his feet, then a spray of bullets decked him again. He was lucky, he knew that; the fire had been wild, and while his kinetic barriers had gone, his armour was able to absorb the three or four stray shots which had hit him. They still hit him like a krogan punch, but as he went down he was already rolling to bring his assault rifle to bear. He made out a figure of some sort and fired reflexively, and they jerked under the barrage and slumped on top of him, the heavy armour crushing the breath from his lungs. One more ear-splitting round snapped somewhere off behind him, a body hit the floor, and then silence suddenly descended.

It had been about four seconds since the lift had opened.

"Fuck! Fuck!" someone was saying. _Ah. Sidonis is still alive, I see._

"Naargh," Garrus managed, which was almost exactly his current mental process, and shoved the body on top of him sideways onto the floor with a wet thump. Slowly, painfully, he dragged himself upright and limped out of the elevator, his dripping assault rifle dangling from one hand. Sidonis was standing just outside, still holding his pistol out, a look of mixed shock and euphoria written across his face.

"Fuck," he said again.

"Yeah," Garrus agreed. "Couldn't have put it better myself."

There were seven bodies on the floor of the elevator, the floor of which was already covered in one large blue puddle that was only growing. Three had taken Sidonis's bullets to the head, and four more had fallen victim to Garrus's fire; all of them were dead.

Garrus closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, the familiar coppery smell of blood filling his nostrils. The pain was receding to a manageable level – _been hit in the head so many times that I know exactly how manageable 'manageable' is, probably not good that I know that –_ but his breathing was still rough and wheezing. He leant back against one wall for a few seconds to compose himself, then opened his eyes again.

"We OK?" Sidonis asked.

"Yeah," Garrus said, after a moment, and slotted a fresh thermal clip into his assault rifle. "Yeah, we're OK. Let's move."

He made a move for the elevator, but Sidonis put out an arm to stop him. Garrus raised a questioning eyebrow at him.

"I don't think I want to take this one," Sidonis muttered, and pressed a different call button.

Fortunately, the next elevator was empty. Garrus thought he'd worked out why the last one hadn't been – the troopers were already going up, and the elevator system had assumed they'd wanted to go with them. _Damn stupid reason to get into a fight, as well._

As the doors slid shut and the elevator started to slide rapidly downwards, he clicked off his music and slumped against the wall, still breathing hard. Blood was trickling down from a small cut on the back of his head, and his armour had a few more dents to add to its impressive collection, but he knew damn well he'd got off lucky. The one reason he was even alive was that he'd had the fastest reactions and the presence of mind to take it into CQC, and that it had even come close to working was nothing short of a miracle.

He was opening up his omnitool to order a minor dispensation of medigel, enough to bring him back up to full combat capability but not a full dose, when a voice in his earpiece suddenly spoke up.

"Garrus," it said. "Garrus, you there?"

"Here."

"They're bringing in personal shields," Erash said tersely. "Like they had earlier. They're gonna try and make a push towards us."

"So shoot them down," Sidonis said.

The salarian grunted. "Easier said than done. Where are you?"

"In the elevator," Garrus said.

"Great," Erash said. "Just great. Go quickly, OK? We can't hold out forever."

"Understood," Garrus said, and the transmission cut out.

There were a few seconds of silence as the elevator hummed downwards.

"Well, this is fun," Sidonis said brightly.

Garrus's eyes narrowed. "Nobody even hit you."

"Yeah, I guess the parts where people who aren't me get hurt actually are quite fun," Sidonis mused. "See if you can do more of those."

"You're going to get hurt sooner or later," Garrus said sagely, as the elevator slid to a stop and the display flicked onto a glowing **8**.

"Probably," Sidonis agreed. "But, the way things are going now, you'll get hurt first. I'm OK with that."

"Yes, you would be," Garrus said drily, and the doors opened again.

The corridors on this level of the building were simpler, floored in some kind of uniform off-white plastic, with a similar shade on the walls. The cross design held true, however, and another three hundred metres of corridor stretched away into the distance in front of them, absolutely devoid of life. The white colour scheme gave it an oddly artificial look, more research lab than office building, but a lot of places tended to use cheap materials like these on less important floors.

"Where to?" Sidonis asked.

Garrus consulted his HUD. The green line had started up again after they'd stepped out of the elevator, stretching up the corridor until it made a sharp right turn about a hundred metres down, into a closed door.

He jerked his head in the universal 'this way' gesture and set off at a jog, following the line. Again, the only sound was their footsteps, echoing oddly off the long, flat surfaces, but that was all they heard and the blank corridor all they saw until they reached the door. It was a more conventional round design that split into two horizontal segments and rolled away as they approached it, opening onto a much narrower hallway, one that was maybe two metres across and thirty down. The green line was painted straight down the middle of it, turning left at the T-branch at the end.

He brought his rifle to the ready at his shoulder and moved on. Sidonis fell in beside him, switching from his pistol to his own assault rifle, and they advanced at a slower pace to the corner. There, Garrus pressed himself up against the wall to throw a glance at what lay ahead from cover, seeing nothing but another empty corridor, narrower and shorter still. The green line was still hovering over his left eye, marking the way.

The next corridor passed in the same way, and then the next. There had been a few doors leading off in various directions, but the route marker insisted they were heading the right way even as it felt like they were going in circles. Every corner they came to felt horribly exposed, but there was still nobody in sight or in earshot.

"This building," Sidonis muttered, "had a really shitty architect."

Garrus snorted. "If you're holding out somewhere with a sniper rifle, then it couldn't be much better."

"That's not really what most designers are thinking about, is it?"

"Well, they should be," Garrus said. "It's what I would do."

"But what if someone else has the sniper?"

"You snipe them. There are very few problems in the universe that cannot be solved with a sufficient application of sniper rifle."

"But what if you don't _have _a sniper rifle?" Sidonis pressed.

"Trick question," Garrus replied. "I _always_ have a sniper rifle."

"You don't now."

"A good point, Sidonis, but shut up."

"Like that, is it?"

"Yep."

They rounded another corner, still with their guns at their shoulders, and came to the last stretch of corridor. The green line in Garrus's visor terminated in a wide arrowhead at the last door on the right, and his HUD highlighted the round slab of metal in blinking white for a few seconds.

"This is our stop," he said quietly. Sidonis nodded, suddenly deadly serious, and took up a position on the left side of it, while Garrus took the right, next to the door's release panel.

"What are we looking at?" Sidonis asked.

Garrus consulted the map in the background of his visor again, bringing it to the front of the display with a quick flick of his eye. The room past the door was a mid-sized rectangle, but there were a clutch of small rooms about three metres square attached to two of the walls, presumably the cells. Aside from that, there was no detail to the map, which worried him. _Could be anything in there._

"Medium size, but it's an SSP 7," he said, and Sidonis nodded again in understanding. Every turian who'd undergone the mandatory basic combat training knew the list of Standard Situation Protocols about as well as they knew their own name, and SSP 7 was simple military shorthand for 'unknown enemy strength, unknown terrain, our position not known by the enemy'. It wasn't an ideal situation by any measure, but it wasn't a terrible position; they had to hope their abilities and the element of surprise would be enough to counter not knowing the layout of the room. In fact, the official Hierarchy guidelines for such a situation were essentially 'charge and then maybe find cover', which was mostly a tactic adopted from observing the krogan rebellions. It usually worked, though, so the usual krogan take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards tactics being used in official turian doctrine wasn't quite as worrying to Garrus now as it had been to Cadet Grade Eight Vakarian, who'd thought every engagement was going to be as meticulously planned and surgical as the propaganda vids showed. _Ah, memories. Everything was so simple then. Simple and bad. Now everything's complicated and bad. I don't know if that's an improvement._

"On three?" Sidonis said.

"No," Garrus said. "On now."

He pressed the button, and the door slid open. He and Sidonis were already moving with it, and they were already firing as they entered the room. Garrus's visor had picked out targets for him almost immediately, giving him an estimated enemy strength of eight, and he fired three bursts at one of the glowing outlines as it started backwards in surprise. The shields went quickly but the armour held, and the figure's gun came up to return fire as some of the more organised among his companions opened up as well. His shields swatted aside the few shots that would have hit him, but there was too much fire to stay out in the open, and he leapt forward and ducked down behind a heavy, waist-high crate of some kind to let his shields recover.

_Oh, crates. How I have missed your loving embrace._

It was his first chance to get a quick look around and to analyse what he'd seen in those first few seconds; it had all been a blur, and he'd been fixated solely upon getting what shots he could off, but the cover afforded him a little time to put the pieces together.

The room was simple in design, which worked against them; that left them few places to hide, and they were as outnumbered as ever. There was a central dais raised about a metre off the ground which housed some kind of large console, but that was more or less it; the rest of the room was as bland and white as the rest of the floor except for three doors on each of the right and back walls, and the only thing that had prevented them from being slaughtered almost immediately was the fact that the room had about a dozen crates scattered across it. The sheer logistics of having this many well-equipped soldiers working out of one room meant it was inevitable that there would be some general detritus like this, he reasoned, but they'd been lucky that the crates had been close enough to the door not to force a retreat. _And unlucky about the numbers. I'd assumed there'd be four or five max. They must really want to stop people from getting to Vunas._

Sidonis had found a similar crate away to his left, and their eyes met as the troopers, still recovering from the surprise attack, poured a barrage of suppressing fire over the crates.

"So," Sidonis said conversationally, his voice carried directly into Garrus's ears by their com link, "that didn't go well."

"Not really," Garrus said.

"Got a plan?"

"Not really."

"Great."

The fire had started to peter out, and when it dropped away entirely at one point Garrus instinctively popped up from cover. Only a few of the troopers had taken cover at all, leaving five standing around in the open, and he sighted the nearest and started blasting. The range was about fifteen metres, enough of a distance for the kinetic barriers to be fully effective, but the first three bursts put pay to them. His unfortunate target was swapping his thermal clip, but the others focused fire on Garrus again, and warning lights started to blink inside his visor as a volley of incandescent shots crashed against his kinetic barriers. He got two more bursts away before he had to duck down again, but a thrill of satisfaction raced through him as the second trio of rounds punched through the chest armour weakened by the first, ripping past heavy duraplas and into flesh and organs. The trooper didn't fall, instead only staggering and dropping to one knee, but with wounds like that he wouldn't last more than thirty seconds before blood loss and shock brought him down. Away to his left, Sidonis had taken advantage of the fire focused on Garrus to hammer away at another of the exposed figures – in fact, the one whose shields had been weakened by Garrus's first assault – who _did_ go down under the loud rattle of Sidonis's fire, though his armour and the range stopped any spectacular sprays of blood.

"Well, that's two," Sidonis said, sinking back behind his crate. "Gotta say, these guys aren't very smart."

"The one on the left," Garrus said. "Concentrated fire. Go."

As one, they rose and opened fire. As expected, one of the soldiers was still standing in open ground on the left side of the room, a few metres ahead of Sidonis, though he was at least trying to move back and find cover. Their fire converged on him and blew away his shields in less than two seconds, then speared through his armour and dropped him like a stone in half that again. A few more shots cracked towards them, but only two came near him, and both fizzled out of existence against his kinetic barriers. That gave him time to pick a new target, who was now the only one still in the open; one of the others had been able to find a crate to dive behind, while the one who Garrus had wounded earlier seemed to have obligingly dropped dead, but this one was still blithely trying to lay down suppressing fire by himself. The last two bursts his thermal clip could muster perforated the shields but not the armour, and Garrus ducked down again to reload as Sidonis finished the job, sending five shots through the trooper's upper body. The last smashed through the visor of the helmet, leaving him dead before he hit the deck, and Sidonis grunted in triumph as he returned to cover and reloaded.

"And two more," Garrus murmured, snapping the fresh thermal clip into place. "Simple."

The last couple of shots of suppressing fire died away as the surviving four troopers wisely stayed in cover, and an oddly silent air descended over the room. Garrus cautiously raised himself up just high enough to survey the room, but from his position near the door he couldn't see much besides the central dais and a scattering of crates. No convenient heads presented themselves for him to shoot.

"Hey!" Sidonis called. "You guys are pussies! Four of you, two of us? What the fuck are you waiting for?"

"What the hell are you doing?" Garrus hissed.

Sidonis shrugged. "Making them angry, I guess? Can't hurt our chances."

"...I'm trying not to agree with you," Garrus said reluctantly.

"Good for you," Sidonis replied, craning his neck to see over his crate. "After all – contact!"

Garrus jerked up and brought his rifle around to bear, and his visor immediately highlighted the figure on top of the central platform. He'd probably been trying to get close without being seen, Garrus realised, but he'd made a hell of a hash of it, and he and Sidonis opened fire almost simultaneously. It was simple; three bursts and the trooper slumped forward over the edge of the dais, his gun clattering to the floor from twitching arms as his nervous system gave up the ghost.

"Told you," Sidonis said, sliding back down behind his crate.

"Ah, he'd have done that anyway," Garrus said.

"Like hell he would! That was entirely down to my tactical brilliance, that was."

"Your idea of 'tactical brilliance' being 'screaming abuse'? Forgive me if I don't like the idea of staking my life on it."

"It worked, didn't it?" Sidonis said, sounding affronted.

Garrus slotted in a new thermal clip, one of the half-spent ones he'd saved from earlier, which had had enough time to cool sufficiently to bring it back to full capacity. "No," he said.

"Go fuck yourself, then," Sidonis said diffidently.

"Perhaps later. There's three left. You think we can take them?" Garrus said, lowering his voice to a whisper.

Sidonis snorted. "These idiots? Easily."

"Good," Garrus said, and vaulted his crate in one smooth motion. He pounded around the dais and a trooper rose from cover in surprise at the sudden attack, presenting an easy target. Garrus fired three bursts as he closed the distance, only taking a few shots in return fire, and he was close enough by the last for it to shred shield, armour and body all in one. The soldier crumpled backwards as Sidonis's assault rifle chattered loudly on the other side of the room, and Garrus leapt the crate and the body in one bound, coming around to the back of the central platform. Another trooper was there, backing away from him with gun raised and ready to fire, but even with that disadvantage Garrus got the first burst away, the range short enough for him to obliterate the kinetic barrier in one shot. He took a few more shots to his kinetic barriers, but they never dropped beneath forty percent, and his next tight burst of fire was, purely by chance, a triple headshot. The entire front of the turian's helmet exploded inwards, and by the time the last of the three rounds had hit home, there wasn't much of a head left inside it.

The trooper stiffened, then slumped sideways onto a crate to his left, ending up draped over it as viscous fluid from his ruined head trickled down onto the floor. Garrus looked up to see Sidonis standing over the body of the last enemy.

"Clear?" Garrus said.

"Clear," Sidonis confirmed, and pumped one last round into the dead trooper. The body jerked a little, and a puff of blue sprayed up.

Garrus moved over to the four steps up to the dais, returning his assault rifle to his back, and tapped a button. A holographic display leapt into life, showing the six cells that were attached to the room by opaque metal doors from a 3D bird's-eye perspective. Five were empty. The last one, the central one attached to the back wall, depicted a blue wireframe figure sitting down on a small bed. Garrus touched the cell, and a live surveillance feed of it popped up.

"She looks OK," Sidonis said at his shoulder, peering at the display. Garrus nodded; Vunas was sitting on the simple camp bed that had been provided, staring at nothing, but she didn't seem to be physically harmed in any way. In fact, she was still wearing that same worn dressing gown, which didn't seem any worse for wear. _Well, figuratively._

"I'll open the cell," he said, and pressed the control marked 'RELEASE'. A confirmation popup appeared. He pressed 'YES', and the door's lock symbol switched from blue to red to indicate that it had been opened. Sidonis moved back down the steps to open the door, and Garrus turned just in time to see it slide open.

Vunas glanced up at them, with not even the least expression of surprise.

"Well, that was fast," she said drily, and stretched.

"Are you OK?" Sidonis demanded.

"I've had worse." Vunas got up from the bed as if it had been her own and walked out of the cell, passing between them. She stooped, and took a dropped assault rifle from the floor, hooking the adjustable strap over her shoulder. "Shall we?" she said, turning back to them.

"What, you're not even going to ask what's going on?" Garrus said, slightly nonplussed at her lack of reaction.

"Later, maybe," Vunas said. "Right now, I'm assuming we're focused on the escape side of things. Of course, we can stand around here and exposition at each other in the middle of an enemy base, if you like. You're the commandos. Your choice."

Garrus and Sidonis glanced at each other, and simultaneously shrugged.

"Fair enough," Garrus said, secretly rather impressed at the way she was handling the situation. Then again, having met her, he couldn't exactly have expected anything different. There was just simple pragmatism, the rare ability to completely and fully accept that there would be a time later when things could be explained and that insisting on hearing them now might well mean there wouldn't _be_ a 'later'. Not exactly what most people would have expected from a barely-mature asari in a bathrobe.

"Plan?" Sidonis said. "Tell me you have one this time."

"Back to the office, ASAP," Garrus said. "Link up with Melenis and Erash and fight our way back to the car."

"Can we not just take the car?" Sidonis said, but Garrus shook his head vehemently.

"No. We need them."

"Friends of yours?" Vunas inquired, with just enough emphasis on the 'yours' to tell them exactly what she thought of people who would be their friends. It wasn't nice.

Garrus scratched his chin awkwardly. "Yes. Well, no. Sort of. Maybe. Look, it's really, really complicated, OK?"

"Well, nothing's ever easy," Vunas said, and turned for the door.

They got back to the elevator without much difficulty, following the new route marker Garrus had set to lead them back to the top floor. Nobody met them along the way, nor was there any reason to expect them to, but they still kept the unarmoured, unshielded asari firmly between them at all times, to what looked like her faint amusement. They didn't relax until they were safely back inside and the doors had hissed shut behind them.

"This is actually going surprisingly well," Sidonis commented after a few seconds.

"Is it?" Vunas said innocently. "I couldn't tell, what with me being inside a jail cell. Was there any reason for that? Why would you even tell someone where I was?"

"There are valid reasons for all – well, for most of these things," Garrus said, "but it's all horrendously complicated. There's this one guy who seems to more or less know what's going on, though. Talk to him."

"By the way, that tip about the Emendus family was pretty fucking useful," Sidonis said. "That's the only reason we even found you."

"Oh, good. The only thing that saved me from the danger I was in because I was investigating the Emendus family was the fact that I was investigating the Emendus family. Really outdid myself there," Vunas said drily.

Garrus opened up a com link to Erash as the numbers on the elevator's display ticked upwards. "Erash. We've retrieved Vunas, and we're on our way up now."

"About goddamn time!" Erash snarled, so viciously that Garrus almost flinched. In the background of the call, he could hear a low-grade sound he at first assumed was static before he realised it was the sound of a firefight. "We've got the data, but they've established a beachhead with their shields!"

"I don't think you can have a beachhead in a corridor."

"Neither did I, but they've done it! There's just too many to go through, and they keep moving it forward!"

"Yes, that does sound bad," Garrus said sympathetically. "Numbers?"

"Is 'too many' a number?"

"No."

"Well, there's that many! Get up here and get behind them so we can get the fuck out of here!"

"Speed would indeed be advisable," Melenis said, cutting into the line. "Our position is not sustainable."

"Understood. Hold the line," Garrus said. "We'll be-"

The line dissolved into static, this time for real. He recognised the pitch of it as the type caused by a fairly simple field-jammer, and grimaced. Simple or not, that was serious tech, especially for an indoor firefight.

"'Hold the line'? That sounds bad," Sidonis said.

"It is," Garrus said thoughtfully. _I don't like our odds in that kind of enclosed space against the kind of numbers they're talking about, even if we get them by surprise. The fire will just be too much, and there's nowhere to run if our initial attack is serious enough to actually do any damage. But we need them out alive..._

_Wait. 'Out'._

"Sidonis," he said, after a few moments' thought, "I have an idea."

"Oh," Sidonis said bitterly. "I bet you do."

* * *

"Where the _hell_ are they?" Erash spat, as he unloaded yet another clip into whatever spare body parts he could see that weren't behind the mass of blue shields slowly moving along the corridor. There weren't many. The shields took up most of the width of the corridor with not a single gap between them, and although the corridor was littered with bodies, that didn't stop its advance. There were still at least thirty of them crouching behind it, easily enough to turn them both into mincemeat inside half a second if they got close enough. As it was, they were still thirty metres away and he was doing everything he could to slow them – he'd switched back to his own pistols, discarding the sniper rifle after the range had narrowed sufficiently as to make it useless – but they just wouldn't stop, and they didn't have long left.

"They will come," Melenis said calmly. Erash ducked back inside the smouldering door-frame and scowled at him as he reloaded. The door and the desk they'd used to keep it shut were lying in smoking, molten pieces on the ground around his feet, unable to stand up to the sheer, constant volume of fire.

"They'd better, or we are indescribably fucked," he muttered, and leant out to open fire again. Melenis was making more shots than he was with the aid of his long-barrelled hand cannon and computer-aided aim, but even so they were only picking off a few of the more incautious ones – and there weren't many of those left alive.

"We can still drop down to the floor below," Melenis reminded him, his massive frame rolling around the other side of the doorway to open up again.

"So can they," Erash said darkly. "And we can't get back to the roof without access to this – _fuck!_"

A round had finally penetrated his armour and shields alike, the shot tearing into the flesh down on the left side of his stomach. It wasn't a serious wound, but it hurt like hell until the medigel kicked in to take the worst of it off, and it rattled him. That had been the first wound he'd taken in combat in eight months, as well! How dare they shoot him? That was his job!

"It should not be serious," Melenis said, after the briefest of glances at the wound.

"It still goddamn hurt! _Where are they?_"

He delivered two full clips inside five seconds at the oncoming mass of energy and bodies, but when he yanked his head back inside just in time to avoid the new barrage directed at the spot it had just been occupying, hissing from the pain in his side, his hand fell to his belt and found no more thermal clips.

"Out!" he called. Melenis, still firing with one hand, unclipped a pouch of clips from his midsection and threw it across to him. It only had five inside, but that was enough for the moment, and he started to reload-

The window behind them shattered into a thousand pieces. The duraplas was hard, but not _that _hard, and it broke like so much rice paper with an ear-splitting crash. Erash looked around in astonishment to see an aircar – no, not _an_ aircar, _their _aircar! - sliding across the floor in the last stages of a controlled crash landing, much of one side crumpled and bent as the door opened, swinging up with a hiss as the car ground to a screeching halt on the floor.

"Need a ride?" Garrus shouted from the back seat.

Erash grinned savagely, and peeled away from the doorframe. One hand came around to his waist and pressed a release button, and a belt of capsules fell away from him as its catch opened, clattering onto the floor as if it had simply been forgotten. Then he was inside, diving headlong into the car as Melenis followed, ducking under the closing door, then in a whirlwind of motion and noise as the engine started and the troopers in the corridor, realising what was happening, surged forward and opened up fruitlessly at the disappearing car. It had all happened in about three seconds, a pitch-perfect evacuation.

Well, not quite pitch-perfect. Yet.

Even as he sat up, he was tapping one last command into his omnitool. It asked him to confirm. He confirmed.

As the car climbed high into the rain, Erash let a small, satisfied grin creep across his face.

Two hundred metres behind them and growing further with every second, every gram of explosives left in his belt detonated as one. There had still been well over a kilogram of various substances in those capsules, and it would have been enough to obliterate a small building if placed tactically, let alone one executive office. In a rough, harshly loud gout of flame, light and sound, the entire room and ten metres of corridor outside became a rapidly expanding zone of pure elemental chaos, leaving every single one of the thirty-three troopers who'd been standing in and around it reduced to little more than blood, tiny chunks of meat, and ashes.


	18. Divine Intervention: Plans

**DIVINE INTERVENTION**

**ELEVEN: PLANS

* * *

**

"That," Vunas said, "is the stupidest story I've ever heard."

"Agreed," Garrus said sourly, as he applied another layer of medigel to the gash on the back of his head. "And the worst thing is that it all happened. We think."

They were sitting in the armoury back at Sensat's main base, using crates of ammunition as seats as they went through the usual practice of repairing damage and wear on their armour, their weapons and on their own bodies. Garrus had only taken a few shots to the armour and those had been glancing, but the medigel he'd used during a lull in the combat was wearing off, and that familiar throbbing pain was starting to ebb back into his body. Sidonis didn't seem to have been hit at all, so he was occupying himself by stripping down his assault rifle, while Erash was brooding in a corner, a square patch of medigel-infused fabric clutched to the wound in his side. Melenis had disappeared to find Sensat as soon as the car had touched down, and they'd been gone for well over an hour, while they recovered and Garrus filled Vunas in on what had been going on. It had taken a good while just to get it straight in his own mind, but he was reasonably sure he'd explained the situation to the best of his knowledge.

_Which, admittedly, isn't exactly complete._

"I know, right?" Sidonis said, looking up. "One fucking month ago, everything's just fine. I have a stable, well-paying job, I've never even heard of Deus, and very few people are specifically trying to kill me. Two weeks ago, I've lost the job and all my friends are dead, but it's OK because now I have a cool starship instead. Now? I'm fighting a war for someone who clearly doesn't give a shit about me for reasons I don't really understand against someone I've never even seen and know nothing about."

"Weren't you planning your attack on Vult a month ago?" Garrus said, frowning.

Sidonis waved a dismissive hand. "Probably, but the point still stands. This is ridiculous. I have no idea what I'm doing or why."

"I find," Erash chimed in, still sounding faintly pained, "that while Sensat may be... opaque sometimes-"

"Always," Sidonis said.

"-whatever he says is the right thing to do is usually the right thing to do."

"'Usually' is all well and good until it gets you killed," Garrus said.

Erash sighed, and shifted his position a little. "Look, I'm not saying he's infallible or anything. But his intel has been more or less flawless for all the time I've worked for him. I'm just saying that he's earned my trust in that respect."

"And the fact that he built a biological superweapon?" Vunas said, raising an eyebrow.

"...yeah, that probably wasn't a good idea," Erash admitted, "but in fairness to me, I was only hired about five years after he started. Hell, I didn't even know exactly what he was building until he told us after Deus backstabbed him. I don't think Melenis knew either, but I'm not sure. He keeps to himself a lot."

"Ah, this is the cyborg volus, yes?" Vunas said wearily. "Run this one by me again."

"I don't know, OK?" Erash said, an edge of annoyance in his voice. "He was here first, by a couple of months. He's never told me how he got like that, and if he doesn't want to tell me, that's his right. All I know is that he used to be a writer living on Omega, then _something_ happened, and Sensat built him that synthetic body."

"A writer," Vunas said.

"Yes."

"And he's now a cyborg death machine."

"Yes."

"Unusual career move, certainly," Garrus said.

"I don't know anything more," Erash said testily. "Understand? None of us have the right to, not unless he wants to tell us. It's none of your damn business."

"Calm down, horns," Sidonis said. "We get it."

Erash shook his head. "No, you don't. You've known him what, three hours? Don't even try to tell me you get it. I don't get it, and I've known him three _years_. So don't push it."

"How'd you meet him, anyway?" Sidonis said, changing tack.

"Who, Sensat?" Erash said. "He made me a better offer. Eclipse were a bunch of assholes, and I'd lost too many friends there."

"What, he just came up to you and hired you?" Garrus said. "I thought Eclipse had better asset retention than that."

"I think he put a lot of thought into the choice," Erash said. "He told me he was only putting together a very small team, and that he wanted my expertise. But yes, essentially; he got in contact with me through a third party and made me an offer I couldn't refuse. That was it. Eclipse didn't even know I'd gone. Probably didn't care all that much. I was only ever a security consultant working on minor contracts, so it's not as if they couldn't fill the position I vacated."

"And this whole thing is suddenly reaching a head?" Vunas asked.

"Seems like it," Garrus said. "I mean, I woke up this morning and everything was more or less fine. It's been less than a day, and, well, I don't think anything's fine any more."

"Hey, it's your fault," Erash said. "I thought Sensat was dead until a couple of weeks ago, and the only thing that changed that was you two turning up. This was always going to happen; it was just a case of when. You're the spark in the powder keg, and we're riding the blast wave."

"And one way or another," Garrus said grimly, "it ends tonight."

"So you're going to do it," Vunas said, without looking at him. "You're going to go charging into the lair of some insane, paranoid warlord. With five of you."

"Pretty much," Garrus said.

"You're all going to get killed. You know that, right?"

"There's more at stake than our lives here."

Vunas regarded him closely with bright green-grey eyes for a moment, then looked down. "You really believe that, don't you?" she said. "That's interesting. That's very interesting. And that's what's going to cost you."

Garrus blinked. "Explain."

"You're placing ideals above people. I'd have thought you'd have learned by now that people and ideals are fundamentally incompatible. The only way to do it is compromise, finding the balance between the way people are and the way you'd like them to be. You put your ideals first, and that means people around you get hurt." She glanced up at him again, and this time there was an odd expression in her eyes, somewhere between pity and admiration. "You'll get yourself killed. Even if it's not today, by some miracle, then later. You can't live like that."

"No," Garrus said, shaking his head vehemently. "No, you're wrong. That's the only way I can live. You've got nothing to live for if you've got nothing you'll die for."

"But that's my point," Vunas said softly. "In this galaxy, you can't afford to put anything but yourself first. You live like you do, and you run up quite a debt. Some day, some way, that debt will be paid, and you know it."

There was a long, long moment of silence as Sidonis and Erash looked first at Garrus, then back to Vunas, then to Garrus again.

"Yeah," Garrus said, at last. "I do. But that's the way the game is played."

"Then you'll lose."

"That depends on how you define 'winning'," Garrus said with the ghost of a smile. "You want to live nine hundred years and own your own planet and call that victory, then nothing's stopping you. But I want to make a difference. I want someone, somewhere in the future, to look back at something I did and think 'Yeah, this helped'. It's not the world you have, but the world you leave behind."

"Well, this is getting depressing fast," Sidonis muttered. "I do love a good brood."

"Well, I'm not going to tell you how to think," Vunas said, and stretched, rolling her neck from side to side. "I won't tell you what to do. But I'm done."

"Done?" Sidonis said.

Vunas nodded. "Done. This isn't worth it. Not for me. Thanks for the rescue, no thanks for getting me involved in this trainwreck in the first place. Actually, you'd better pay me now. I don't want to-"

The door to the armoury slid open again, and Sensat walked though, Melenis following a few steps behind.

"We have him," he announced.

"Hey, that's great," Vunas said cheerfully. "Wonderful. I'll be leaving, then. You owe me for-" she started counting off on her fingers- "the work done, the emotional and physical trauma suffered as a result of working for you, my apartment being burned-"

"Yes, you've made your point," Sensat said, cutting her off. "I recommend you leave the planet. Deus's agents may still be searching for you."

"Not until you pay me," Vunas said, folding her arms.

Sensat regarded her blankly for a moment, then brought up his omnitool and entered a series of commands. There was a pause of a few seconds, then he removed a small, cubic data block from a pocket and held it out to Vunas. She took the little black box with a frown, holding it up to the light.

"What-"

"When we were going through the files we stole," Sensat said, "we identified several of the major companies Deus runs. That block contains the entire staff lists, management structure, long and short-term goals, accounting records, holdings data, schedules and security codes to Unalla Industries."

Vunas's eyes widened. "That's-"

"Information worth several hundred million credits at the very least, if used correctly. I have no need for it. Use it as you see fit. Take one of the cars, if you wish." Sensat jerked his head back towards the door. "Get offworld. Omega, Invictus, Illium. Any choice is enough, just not here."

"I will," Vunas said hoarsely, and cleared her throat. "I, um, thanks."

Sensat waved a hand. "Not needed, not wanted. One condition only: you do not speak a word of what you know about these events to anybody. Ever."

"Believe me, that's the last thing I want to do," Vunas murmured, and turned back to Garrus and Sidonis. "Goodbye, then. I'll be in contact, if you survive. For what it's worth, I hope you do."

"Have a funeral for me if I don't," Sidonis said. "Something nice, with flowers. And much weeping and gnashing of teeth. I hear that works well."

"I'll see what I can do," Vunas said, deadpan once more, and nodded to Garrus. "Try not to get killed."

"Sound advice," Garrus said, smiling thinly. "Same to you."

Vunas nodded again, and turned to go. "Have fun storming the castle," she said, and walked past Melenis and out of the room, the door hissing shut behind her.

_Just like that. She met us this morning, dirt poor, and walks out of here a millionaire a few hours later. I'd be surprised, but given the way my day has gone so far, I don't think I have the capacity any more._

"Nice woman," Sensat said vaguely. "I like her attitude. Anyway, come on. We have plans to lay."

"Do these plans involve us attacking a large superior force on their home turf?" Garrus said as he got up, without much hope.

Sensat nodded. "Unless you can come up with a way of attacking a large superior force on their home turf _without_ doing so, yes."

* * *

"Computer. Give me a projection of Deinech, diameter one metre."

At Sensat's command, the lights of the conference room dimmed, and Garrus leaned forwards in his chair to watch the show. At first there was nothing, then a vast grey sphere suddenly erupted out of nowhere, growing from a tiny point to a metre across in a few milliseconds. It was entirely grey, but it wasn't smooth; the grey was darker in some places, lighter in others, and rippled and sculpted all the way across the planet into elaborate swirls and heavy, ominous masses.

Sensat, standing on the opposite side of the table, nodded in approval, and sipped coffee from the opaque glass he was holding. "Remove cloud cover."

The grey suddenly vanished, replaced by blue. Every scrap of the planet's surface was ocean, even the poles, and the sphere glowed like a vast marble, suddenly much smoother than before as the cloud patterns disappeared in favour of what looked like flat blue sea. There were, however, a few tiny specks of land visible, the largest of them still barely visible at this scale – a minute island of grey among infinite blue.

"Pretty," Sidonis said, from his seat next to Garrus, "but it doesn't tell us shit."

"Shut up," Sensat said calmly, without even looking at him. "Focus on coordinates one-four-four-point-nine south, nine-point-seven east. Scale: three kilometres to one metre."

After the briefest of pauses, the hologram changed again. The sphere flattened itself into a flat square and descended until it was barely above the tabletop, and even the last few specks of grey disappeared. The metre-square map laid out before them was all blue, smooth as glass.

"That," Garrus said, after a second, "is the sea."

Sensat glanced at him, the blue glow of the projection dancing in his eyes. "Incorrect. It _appears _to be the sea."

"Well, yeah," Sidonis said. "It's just an image. It's not the actual sea-"

"That's not what I meant," Sensat snapped. "We retrieved the entirety of the files locked in that computer intact. For the most part, it was to do with business, and I've gained quite an insight into the ways Deus's financial empire is run, but for the moment that is immaterial. At the very highest level – a level that somebody with less experience of the way Deus's files are encrypted would never even have noticed – there were several fragmented files relating to his... _other_ activities."

"Meaning this whole mess," Garrus said.

"Indeed. He was smart enough to keep the information to an absolute basic level, so that it couldn't be used against him – but I don't believe his lieutenants are anywhere near as intelligent. The encryption was clumsy. I gained access to files that told me exactly where he's based."

"How?" Erash said. He'd at least put a shirt on before leaving the armoury, and was sitting a couple of seats down on Garrus's left, leaning back in his chair.

"How?" Sensat echoed. "Melenis."

Melenis, at normal size, stepped forwards from the plastic front of the aquarium he'd been standing against behind Sensat and nodded. "Hidden among the business details," he said, "were certain orders that were supposed to be passed over by anybody who did not know what they were looking for."

"Orders as in?" Garrus asked.

"Orders as in heavy industrial deliveries," Melenis said. "They blended in well with the rest of the shipping data. However, they did not have an end point. They were, according to the files, shipped from Deinech to Illium to Dasak to Invictus to Deinech, in a permanent loop. It was exceptionally well-disguised. I was impressed."

"But you found it," Erash said.

"Deus is good," Sensat said, and took a sip of coffee. "I'm better."

"What's the point, though?" Sidonis said sceptically. "What the hell does that gain him?"

"It was designed in such a way that, by exploiting several tax loopholes granting industrial subsidies, Deus actually made a razor-thin profit on these shipments. However, these shipments were not actually in this loop," Melenis answered. "They were merely reported as being so, in order to create the impression that this was merely an elaborate tax dodge. That meant that they were never technically out of the system of shipments, which in turn meant that they could be unloaded at a certain location while the freighters moved on, supposedly still carrying their cargo. More cargo could then be loaded onto the freighters at different points, then all carried to the same location to be dropped off. Without access to those files, it is absolutely impossible to prove or even to suspect. His trail is covered very, very well."

"And we know where this drop-off point is?" Garrus said.

"We do," Sensat said. "Once we'd established the route this loop took, it was simple enough to trace the cargo. It goes through Valac via the spaceport, then leaves the city by the sea port. The ships travel directly to Yager, across two thousand miles of ocean."

"Yager has a spaceport," Sidonis pointed out. "There's no reason to-"

"Correct," Sensat said. "However, the ships follow a slightly unusual course, if you trace their beacons via the harbour authorities. There is a minor anomaly in the time they are predicted to take and the course they run, one that would go unnoticed unless it were specifically looked for. All of these ships go via a very specific set of coordinates. These, in fact."

He tapped the map laid out before them, his finger penetrating the intangible light to touch the table beneath.

"I hate to be that one guy," Sidonis said, in the voice of someone who is always that one guy, "but that's a big-ass slab of empty ocean."

"As I said," Sensat murmured. "It _appears_ empty. This specific section of ocean is subject to a very powerful cloaking field."

Garrus blinked. "A _cloaking field? _On an _island?_"

"Indeed," Sensat said. "The unique geography of Deinech is what makes it possible. Nobody is looking for a tiny spot in the middle of an ocean, and even if they were the technology required to penetrate this kind of field is military-grade only. The ships can pass through the point without attracting any kind of attention, because quite simply nobody cares. The only people who will find this are those who know of it and are looking for it – and, in our case, have the frequency to the cloaking field."

He entered a quick command into his omnitool, and an island appeared in the middle of the projection.

"And there we have it," Sensat said. "Deus's base of operations."

It looked to be about three square kilometres or so, a rough teardrop shape with a raised, wide headland at one end, a stubby tail curving around underneath it. All along the tail, there was what looked like a dock, a series of open structures with a stack of heavy crates towering fifty metres high and occupying most of the open area on the lower part of the island. At the higher section, as the land inclined gently upwards and widened into the 'head' of the shape, there was a larger structure, an enormous building which covered much of the space left. A lot of it looked like it was taken up with power generators, from the shape of the tall grey blocks comprising the left side, and one tall aerial had to be the projection spire for the cloaking field, while a vast dome that squatted beyond it looked very much like a major kinetic barrier generator. However, there was also a single vast block of no discernible purpose at the back, smooth and grey, with what took Garrus a moment to recognise as six fully-fledged anti-air batteries mounted on top. On the right side was another block, as simply designed as the others but smaller, extending slightly over the sheer cliff on the side of the island, supported by what looked like heavy metal stanchions.

Garrus zoomed his visor in a little further, to check the finer details. There seemed to be a basic courtyard in front of the entrance to the largest block, an open space about fifty metres across bounded by walls that were barely even visible from this distance, from which a road led down to the docks. He made a mental note of it as a position they'd probably need to pass through at some point.

There were a few moments of silence as they stared at the map and the island that had appeared out of nowhere, taking it all in. Garrus quietly brought up his omnitool and downloaded the map to it; it was only a satellite render, which meant that it was depicting only an average of what had been picked up over the last few hours and what it did show wasn't as detailed as he'd have liked, but it was invaluable all the same.

"And we're going to attack that," Sidonis said, with an admirable lack of incredulity.

"Yes," Sensat said.

"The five of us."

"Yes."

"That."

"Yes."

"...the five of us," Sidonis said again, still getting his head around the concept.

"Yes."

Sidonis nodded. "OK. Just making sure."

"He has anti-air guns," Garrus said hollowly. "Anti-air guns!"

"So noted," Sensat said. "As such, an approach by the air is impossible."

"No, hold on," Erash said. "Can't we just get a big fucking bomb and drop it on them?"

"That generator," Sensat said, tapping the dome Garrus had noticed earlier, "is the same model used on the _Destiny Ascension_. We would need a great many – as you so eloquently put it - big fucking bombs to penetrate that, and we don't have them."

"Fair enough," Erash said, drumming his fingers on the table. "So... if we can't approach from the air and we can't just blow it up, what do we do?"

"In theory, we could go by sea," Garrus said doubtfully, "but that's slow, and you've got very little in the way of defence."

"Agreed," Sensat said, and took a gulp of coffee. _He's so deliberately doing that for effect._ "That's why we're going by air."

There was a short pause.

"Ah," Garrus said. "Clearly, I've misunderstood something here."

"You literally just said it was impossible," Sidonis said accusingly, jabbing a finger at Sensat.

"Their anti-air capability means that the use of the ship to approach directly is impossible, yes," Sensat said.

"'The ship' meaning your fabulous genocide contraption, right?" Garrus said acidly.

"Yes," Sensat said, apparently ignoring the phrasing. _Got to admire the unflappability, at least._ "But I propose a method that doesn't require using it to directly approach the island."

_Oh, why oh why do I have the feeling I'm not going to like this?_

"Is this method 'running away'?" Sidonis asked. "That would be nice."

"The guns they have are imported Hierarchy models, from the data we've uncovered," Sensat went on. "High-quality technology, but limited. Their approximate range is ten thousand metres horizontally and three thousand vertically."

"Doesn't sound very limited to me," Sidonis said.

"If we were to bring the ship within range, it would be destroyed within twenty seconds of concentrated fire, and almost certainly sooner. No ships short of larger cruisers or dreadnoughts would be able to sustain that amount of fire for long. My method does not involve taking fire," Sensat said. "The limitations of the AA guns are that they're designed for large targets."

"Yeah, I recognise this model," Garrus said, peering closely at the zoomed image of the turrets rotating slowly in his visor. _Thank you, history classes. I always knew that B- grade would come in handy one day. _"They've been standardised for a couple of centuries now. I know we used them in the Relay 314 Incident as a temporary battlefield emplacement, but the humans could run rings around them with their assault shuttles. They were meant to be firing on frigates, not smaller ships. But we don't _have_ smaller ships."

"That depends," Sensat said, "on what you mean by '_ship_'."

Sidonis half-raised a hand. "Is it just me, or does anything involving the words 'that depends on what you mean by _x_' seem to be nightmarish and horrible?"

"Just you," Garrus assured him.

"You sure?"

"Well, that depends on what you mean by 'sure'-"

"_We have_," Sensat said loudly, talking over them until they fell silent and then proceeding in a more normal voice, "multiple ships of this kind in this building."

"This- what, the cars?" Erash said, in surprise. "You mean the cars?"

Sensat nodded. "It's a simple enough plan. We load up the shuttle bay on the ship with several cars, and use them along with the shuttle itself-"

"Uh, we may have destroyed that shuttle," Garrus said sheepishly.

Sensat glared at him. "How the hell did you manage that?"

"It's... complicated," Sidonis said quietly.

There was an uncomfortable moment of silence in the room as the mood suddenly changed, shifting several levels down past the comfort zone.

"...in any case," Sensat said, ending the moment with what seemed like uncharacteristic tact, "we have enough cars that this will not be a problem."

"So we drop the cars, us inside, out of the ship?" Erash said.

"Essentially, yes," Sensat said. "This will have to be done outside the range of the guns, which means the drop must be made about five to six thousand metres up. The cars will start their engines after one minute and thirty-two seconds, which, with Deinech's gravity, should be at a height of under five hundred metres. By that point, it will be too late to stop us, and they won't have had any heat signatures to help targeting on the way down. The engines break the fall, we land in the courtyard, abandon the cars, and get inside as quickly as possible."

"And they won't be able to shoot us down?" Sidonis said hopefully.

"No," Sensat said. "In theory."

"In theory," Garrus, Erash and Sidonis said as one, with inflections ranging from incredulity to dull horror.

Sensat didn't answer, instead raising his coffee and draining the rest of the glass in one. _Didn't I try that stuff once on the Normandy? Pressly swore by it. I swore _at_ it._

"Yes," he said at last, and set the empty glass on the table with a quiet thunk, nevertheless all too audible in the silence he was speaking into. "In theory, the guns will not be able to track the falling cars with anything like the degree of accuracy required to actually make a hit. In order to maximise this confusion, we will each take a car, to avoid putting all our eggs in one basket, so to speak. However, there remains a chance that there will be a lucky shot."

"How much of a chance are we talking?" Erash said cautiously.

Sensat waved a dismissive hand. "Oh, no more than a third."

The silence was deafening.

"And," Sensat went on cheerfully, "that's merely a worst-case scenario. That allows for them detecting us – likely, but they may not know our intentions immediately – and already having the guns online _and_ them being calibrated to a very high degree of accuracy. All in all, I wouldn't expect a higher than, oh, twenty percent chance of one car being shot down."

The silence continued to be deafening.

"And if it's the car Melenis is in," Sensat continued, a note of slight doubt starting to creep into his voice as he took in their stony expressions, "then he'll survive anyway. Probably. Well, possibly. Maybe."

"You are," Sidonis said, after what seemed like an age, "really not very good at knowing when to stop, are you?"

"It's true, though," Sensat said. "In theory, he could fall out of orbit onto solid ground and be completely unharmed. I built in an advanced system of forcefield repulsors that should have enough charge to slow him sufficiently."

"This has not yet been put to the test," Melenis observed. "I would rather this remain so."

"Uh, to go back to the whole falling and being shot down thing," Erash said, "is that really the best we can hope for? Twenty percent?"

"I think those are very good odds," Sensat said defensively. "I'll have you know that your last mission had less than a fifteen percent chance of succeeding, and that worked."

"Did you work this out before or after you sent us?" Garrus said.

"Oh, before," Sensat said. "I didn't tell you because I thought you'd probably rather not know."

"You were right," Sidonis muttered.

"So noted," Sensat said. "But this time, I'd predict that our overall chance of success is at least twice that."

"So... at least thirty percent," Erash said.

"Yes."

"Oh, well, there you go," Sidonis said sarcastically. "So our plan is: get to the ground, storm the place, kill Deus, wreck his shit, then go to Illium and spend the rest of our lives in casinos, is it? Because this plan seems to rely a whole lot on us being really, _really_ fucking lucky."

Sensat raised an eyebrow. "Do you have a better one?"

"What am I, the, the... plan guy?" Sidonis said irritably. "Can't we do something else?"

"Such as approach by sea?"

"Well, yeah!"

"And be sunk before we're even in visual range."

"OK, then... I don't know!" Sidonis said. "But-"

"But nothing," Sensat said firmly. "If there were any better means of doing this, I would have thought of it. Deus's position is well-defended, and this is the only way I can see to have a good chance of getting us all down safely. This is _it_."

"So this is all we have," Garrus said heavily. "Throw ourselves into hell and hope for the best."

All four of Sensat's eyes flicked up to Garrus. "Better that than waiting for hell to come to us. If we don't put an end to Deus now, there's no telling what he'll do. Did you not wonder what he was doing with all the heavy industrial components being shipped in?"

There was a long, pregnant pause as the implications sank in.

"He's building a ship," Garrus said, after a few seconds. "He's taken your technology and he's replicating it."

"The technology wasn't in the ship itself," Sensat said, "although it was very highly engineered. He has the ADAPT system, certainly, and he'll be building it into his ship – but the components he's buying up are big."

"How big?" Sidonis said.

"From what I've seen," Sensat said, "disturbingly so. The ship I built was based on the template of a frigate, although it was smaller. I'd estimate he's building something like a hybrid of a dreadnought and a cruiser, by the size of that big block there." He tapped the main section of the structure on the island, the huge, flat cuboid that stretched for hundreds of metres on each side. "Smaller than a classical dreadnought design, certainly, but nonetheless a ship with power enough to put it among the most dangerous vessels in the galaxy, even without the ADAPT system factored in. He's brought in a near-dreadnought-sized shield generator, components to build a mass accelerator more powerful than any cruiser packs... I could go on, but you get the gist of it. It's pretty obvious that it's still under construction, but by the dates of these shipments, it can't be too far from functionality."

"Hell," Garrus breathed. "We have to stop him."

"Agreed," Sensat said. "And it happens tonight."

Garrus nodded, but Sidonis grimaced at the idea. "Can it really not wait?" he said. "Just for a day or so. Enough to recover."

"I wish it could," Sensat said, "but the fact of the matter is that Deus is wounded. How many men has he lost in the two engagements we've had today? Hundreds. All five of us are still alive, and this morning there were only three of us. Something of a net gain for our side, I feel. However, Deus has the resources to refill those numbers quickly, if he buys up security mechs or mercenaries. Personally, I feel that he wouldn't stoop to that level even when desperate. That's how he is. But he'll be able to pull in operatives from all over the galaxy within a day, and the odds against us could soon become impossible. We've destroyed the bulk of his force on Deinech. All he'll have left are his closest troops at his headquarters, and there will not be very many. My estimate is that we're looking at perhaps forty or fifty, but with every hour that could go up. He's never been weaker than he is right now. He doesn't know what's going on because we've moved so fast and so efficiently, and his forces are severely damaged. Make no mistake, there's blood in the water. We've only got one chance. Tonight."

Sidonis rubbed his eyes wearily. "This has been, like, the single worst day anyone has ever had. Are you really going to make it worse?"

"Sorry," Sensat said, shrugging. "That's the way it is. I appreciate that you've been thrust into the last stage of things, but that can't change what we do. By the end of the day, either Deus or I will be dead."

"Or both," Sidonis grouched.

"Possibly," Sensat said. "I'd rather not, but we are agreed that he cannot be permitted to continue. Computer, end projection."

The map of the island and the glow of the sea vanished, replaced by the soft light of the regular fixtures returning to power. Garrus blinked at the sudden brightness as Sensat stepped away from the table.

"We move in fifteen minutes," he said. "You all know the plan. Arm up, suit up and pick one of the smaller cars. Garrus, I assume you haven't changed your mind about returning the codes."

_That definitely wasn't a question._

"No," Garrus said. "I haven't."

Sensat nodded. "Very well. I can't change that. You'll need to grant us all at least partial control so that we can make the drop."

Garrus nodded in turn. "Agreed."

"Good," Sensat said. "In that case, let's go. I'd recommend taking several stims each – well, apart from Melenis, obviously."

"So that's it?" Sidonis said. "We just go? It's only been ninety minutes since we got back!"

"We can't wait," Garrus said, and got up. "The only reason we're still alive is that we've thrown everyone off-balance. We let them get their feet back under them, and they realise that we're just five guys. It's all about speed now."

"You know what? Whatever," Sidonis said. "I don't really care any more. I just want this crap over with."

"Well, that won't be a problem, at least," Garrus said. "Like I said. One way or another, it ends tonight."


	19. Divine Intervention: Endgame, Part One

**DIVINE INTERVENTION**

**TWELVE: ENDGAME, PART ONE

* * *

**

Garrus sat back inside his car, painfully aware of the fragility of its chassis, and closed his eyes. He was trying like hell not to think about what he was about to do, which naturally meant that it was the only thing he could possibly think about. His mind was still in that buzzing, semi-hyperactive state you got for the first few minutes after taking stims, and it kept coming back over and over to that one point.

_What the hell am I doing? If you'd told me this morning that I'd be about to drop out of a starship in a car, under heavy anti-air fire, so that I could storm the ultra-secure island fortress of some diabolical madman with a genius batarian engineer, a salarian demolitions expert and a collapsible cyborg volus, I'd have laughed in your face. How did we get here so damn fast?_

He sighed and opened his eyes again, rubbing them hard with the heels of his palms. His vision was bright and clear, sharpened even past its normal 20/20 level by the drugs he was almost entirely fuelled by, but he could still feel a heavy sense of weariness present at the back of his mind, held back for now but always threatening to overwhelm him at a moment's notice. Ideally, he'd have slept for about fifteen hours before the mission, but he knew that was a luxury he was going to have to do without for now.

His car was actually the first one they'd used, the one they'd abandoned their stolen vehicle for after they'd been chased from the first base by Deus's forces, which meant it was essentially a civilian model. He'd have considered that bad, but a single shot from one of those massive AA emplacements would have shredded even a military APC, so for the moment he was happy enough to enjoy the comfortable, soft seat as he stared out through the windshield into a darkening sky. The air curtain separating the ship's hangar from the exterior would have held out the vacuum of space, but all that was outside at the moment was a navy blue sky. For once, it wasn't raining; they were well above the clouds, skimming along at just over five and a quarter kilometres up, and there was little to see besides the sky slowly turning to black.

Sensat's voice crackled in his ear. "I've uploaded the flight program to each car's mainframe. Engines will kick in ninety-two seconds after the drop, at approximately three hundred metres up. They should land about seven seconds later."

"So we don't need to touch the controls?" Erash said, over the same line. His car was parked a metre or so to Garrus's right, a decidedly flashier model than his; it was a neat two-seater Volkswagen-Eluvia model that looked like it had cost fairly serious creds – but more importantly, its dimensions were slightly smaller than those of Garrus's blocky Yender, and his paranoia wouldn't let the fact that it was thus very slightly less likely to be shot down go.

"No," Sensat replied. "I even picked landing spots for each of us. The cars will even launch themselves out of the ship. If everything goes well, then you can just sit back and relax until you touch down."

"Big 'if'," Sidonis said miserably, from his family-sized skycar between Garrus's and Melenis's. Garrus was almost certain it had been an accident that he was both sitting in the largest of the five aircars and that it was parked right in the middle. "What happens if things don't go well? What do I do then?"

"Well," Sensat said, with a viciously sardonic edge entering his voice, "standard practice would be to die instantly and rain down over a large area. Feel free to deviate from that if you wish."

"Operational flexibility is always a good thing," Garrus murmured, and dropped one hand to the rifle laid on his lap. He'd picked it carefully from the racks in the armoury for the task at hand; while he'd had a longer-range, more powerful one last time, he'd opted for a lighter, more easily handled model this time. It was a Coriven 480, capable of getting nineteen shots from every thermal clip with a damn good rate of fire, while the relative lack of power still let him pack a serious punch while also dialling down recoil. It made for an excellent mid-to-long-range weapon, with its slower slug speed not brilliant for traditional sniping but its rate of fire and precise close-range aim ideal for combat in confined spaces. _Four words that seem to define most of my life._ It actually worked more like Industrial-era one-shot rifles, designed to be used at a variety of ranges, although he hadn't quite got around to fixing a bayonet on the end. The same burst-action Vhian he'd taken last time was still clipped to the back of his armour, although he'd been tempted to switch it for a full auto. He'd ultimately stuck with the Vhian on the reasoning that the lack of flexibility would be easily compensated for by having four extra lines of fire in the mix, and the raw, armour-shattering power of its accelerator was nothing to take lightly.

"So noted," Sensat said drily. "Golf, ETA?"

"We will reach the drop point in four minutes and eight seconds, sir," the VI said smoothly. Garrus shivered very slightly at the voice, the eternal worry about smart computers bubbling up again. He didn't have any reason to worry, he reminded himself; Golf wasn't an AI. It still didn't convince him, especially as he thought back to questioning the computer on its creator. It had felt... _wrong_, in some strange indefinable way, although it had probably mostly been because it had enough control over the ship to stop them from destroying it. That was the issue: control. AIs on closed networks were scary enough, especially when they seemingly inevitably went rogue, but when you thought about them gaining control over the extranet, over economies and militaries and tech like Sensat's...

He shook himself mentally, and tried to focus. It was no good; his mind was still flitting around like a mad bird from thought to thought. It would help him in a fight, but for now it was just infuriating.

_Just like Ilos, although it was just nerves back then. Still, we're heading out to face an insane, potentially genocidal turian with his own private army and giant flagship of death, although at least the stakes this time are only billions rather than trillions._

_Yeah, that makes me feel a whole lot better._

_They won't even make a simulstim about this one, either._

The next few minutes passed in silence. Garrus spent them staring blankly out into the sky, watching the stars. The constant cloud cover and relative lack of major cities meant there was little to no light pollution, and the night sky was as brilliant as any he'd seen before. There were thousands of tiny pinpoints of light visible, as well as the first and larger of Deinech's two moons, glinting grey-blue as it crept upwards through the swirls and streaks of light. His visor had helpfully offered to show the names of and interesting facts about each and every one of him, an offer he'd politely declined.

"Thirty seconds until the drop," Golf announced, breaking three minutes of radio silence.

"Alright," Sensat said. "This is it. The last leg. The endgame." There was excitement in his voice, but not wholly the positive kind; he sounded anxious, anticipatory and slightly angry all at once. _I remember feeling like that. First few times you see combat, you're desperate to fight and to run at the same time. Hell, I still feel like that, just not as strongly as I used to._

"The funeral march," Sidonis intoned solemnly.

"Oh, shut up," Erash said, "or for you, it will be."

"Oh, look. The salarian made a threat," Sidonis said mockingly. "Shall we ask the Hierarchy to carry it out for you?"

"Oh, I get it. Because of the genophage," Erash said. "Yes, what _is_ it with you turians using other races' technology to commit genocide? Seems to happen an awful lot."

"Five," Golf said. Underneath Garrus's seat, as Sensat's programming kicked in, the drive of his car hummed into life. The dashboard lit up with a dozen amber displays, none of which were of any use whatsoever. "Four. Three. Two. One."

His car lifted a few feet off the floor of the ship and gently cruised forwards from the suddenly stationary ship's hangar, with Sidonis, Sensat and Melenis's cars doing the same on his left and Erash's following on his right. They left the safety of the hangar entirely and hung in the air for a couple of desperately long seconds before the engines cut out.

Normally, there'd be about a dozen failsafes in place to prevent cars falling out of the sky if their engines cut out. Naturally, they'd been deactivated. Sensat had at least seen fit to leave the inertial dampeners on, but in a civilian car like this they didn't have the power to stop all sense of falling, and Garrus felt his stomach slowly slide up the inside of his body as his car dropped like a rock.

It felt oddly like being in a very fast elevator, albeit one without quite the same ride quality. The car's engines were dead, but miniature thrusters set along its sides were programmed to keep it level rather than let it fall wildly, so it wasn't as bad as he'd expected. It didn't change the fact that he was still falling from five kilometres up in a car with no engines, but it was something.

The cars were still roughly in formation, although there'd been a couple of metres' drift for each of them in that first ten seconds of silent falling.

"Shit," Sidonis's voice said quietly into Garrus's ear. "I just realised what we're doing."

"I know what you mean," Garrus murmured. There was absolutely nothing to tell him that he was falling besides the fact that his stomach appeared to be making a concerted attempt to relocate to his skull – the sky outside was utterly unmoving from his perspective. Leaning over to look out of the window, he could see a whorled grey wall approaching from below as they fell towards the clouds, but the sheer silence was nothing short of eerie.

"They should have detected us by now," Sensat said blandly. "We should start seeing some fire within thirty seconds."

"How thick is the cloud cover?" Garrus asked.

"It'll hide us for about fifteen seconds, but they'll have a predicted trajectory. It won't make a difference to their accuracy."

"Ah, the wonders of technology."

They fell onwards, and that grey plateau silently rose higher and higher, until suddenly it split apart for a millisecond as a bright speck of light crashed silently up through it, flashing away past them into the sky almost faster than the eye could see. It had missed by about fifty metres in front of them, but that was little comfort. _One of those hits any of us, and we don't just get killed: we get vaporised._

"They've started firing," Sensat said helpfully.

"Damn," Garrus said. "I thought it was just Unification Day."

"I've never been on Palaven for the fireworks," Sidonis said wistfully, as another and another shining blast ripped through the clouds and past the plummeting cars. "Actually, I've never been to Palaven."

"It's pretty special," Garrus said. The fire was starting to multiply rapidly as they neared the clouds, with at least one shot coming every second now. All of them had missed, but they were close, far closer than was comfortable. "The fireworks, that is. Well, the planet's not bad either."

The cars smashed through the serene grey surface of the clouds, and the sky disappeared into a rushing sea of opaque fog. The windshield of the skycar was instantly splattered with a deluge of water vapour, its laser wipers boiling it to steam almost as soon as it hit the car.

"You born there?" Sidonis said, as casually as if they were sitting in a bar or walking down a street.

"Yeah," Garrus said. "Cobrius, born and raised. You?"

"Invictus."

"Nice?"

"Not really."

The clouds hadn't concealed everything. Sudden flashes of dim light were still faintly visible through the greyness as shots stormed through it, but Garrus ignored them. _After all, it's not as if I'll have time to realise if one of them hits me._

_Wait, that wasn't as reassuring as I thought it was going to be._

"Thirty seconds to ground," Sensat commented, as the flashes continued all around them. It might have been Garrus's imagination, but they seemed to be getting brighter.

"_Hoshit!_" Erash suddenly yelped, and Garrus's head jerked up reflexively at the noise. The salarian was breathing hard enough to hear over the com link. "That last one came _this_ close to getting me!"

"Stop shouting," Sensat said irritably. "We can hear you perfectly well."

"Literally ten centimetres away," Erash said. "Literally! I think it burned the damn _paint_!"

Without warning, the cloud suddenly vanished, going from full cover to nothing but faint wisps in under a second. The vast, smooth blue surface of the ocean stretched out before them in every direction until it met the navy of the sky at the horizon. The island was directly beneath them, but leaning to one side, Garrus caught a brief glimpse of it, the grey of its structures barely visible in the fading light. Shots from the AA were still howling noiselessly all around them, but their accuracy seemed to be getting worse as they tried to compensate for the decreasing range, and some of the slugs were missing by more than a hundred metres. They were close enough now that he could hear the guns themselves firing, a steady, constant booming noise that rumbled up through the floor of the car a little more than once a second.

"Fifteen seconds," Sensat said.

Garrus lifted the rifle laid on his lap and put it to his shoulder, testing its weight one last time before he'd have to use it. It wasn't something he needed to do, but the seconds were ticking by horribly slowly, and it at least afforded some distraction.

"Ten. Engines triggering... _now_."

The effect was instantaneous. The car came alive, its systems bursting into technicolor lights all across the dashboard as the throaty hum of its main thrusters kicked in underneath him, and the descent rapidly slowed until it was merely fast. The jerk as the sudden thrust arrested the car's fall was powerful even through the dampeners, jolting him almost out of his seat, and the car banked a little as its program guided it in to land.

A couple of seconds later, the top of the complex came into view, and he heaved a sigh of relief as they dropped past the fire zone of the AA guns. They were descending into an industrial landscape, an empty swathe of ground coming up to meet them as the shadow of the vast block of the main building rose higher and higher above the cars, and then the fall suddenly turned into a glide and a second later a landing. Garrus was jolted violently as the car hit the ground far faster than was probably advisable, but he didn't have time to worry about that. The door was already swinging upwards and he scrambled out into the rain, which was coming down even more heavily than before.

"This way!" Sensat called to his left, and he looked around to see him emerging from his own car and heading straight for the entrance to the building. The pounding of the guns on the roof had cut out as soon as they'd lost their fix, leaving nothing but the heavy patter of the rain in the air as Garrus followed Sensat towards the square metal doors. Sidonis was a few steps ahead of him, and that familiar pounding sound heralded Melenis coming up with Erash to his right. _Nobody dead yet, then. Key word 'yet'._

The doors slid open without even an identity check or passcode entry, revealing a large, empty metal-walled room, and they piled inside. When they slid shut, the silence was nothing short of eerie.

"Well, they know we're here," Erash said, drawing an assault rifle from his back. He'd changed his armour to a heavier suit done mostly in black in preparation for the attack, a fairly standard Rosenkov variant that could looked like it could hold up pretty well under fire.

"So noted," Sensat said, and brought his own gun – an ERCS mid-range automatic – to his shoulder. His armour was also a Rosenkov model, but a medium one, and finished predominantly in a similar industrial grey to the colour scheme in the building, although Garrus was fairly confident it wouldn't actually provide much in the way of camouflage. "This is it. We'll need to take out every one of them to get to Deus, in all probability."

"Where are we going?" Sidonis asked. "Do we even know?"

"Towards the main hangar area," Melenis said. "We'll move to the ship he's building. After that, we look around."

"Look around," Sidonis said dully. "Great. We never have a real plan."

"Well," Garrus said thoughtfully, scratching his carapace with one hand, "even if we did have a plan, it would be more or less the same as what we're doing now: kill everyone on the island except us."

"That's the spirit," Sensat said, and set out towards the rounded metal door on the opposite side of the room.

It opened to reveal, to Garrus's absolute lack of surprise, an empty corridor.

_Say what you like about Omega, but at least it has interesting architecture. Deinech's all straight lines. I know this place wasn't really built for aesthetics, but still._

They advanced down its twenty metre length at a slow jog, a pace that kept them moving at a fair speed and allowed enough time to react in a tight spot. Nothing appeared to cause a tight spot by the time they reached the door at the other end and emerged into a wider room. This one seemed to be a sort of hub area, with six doors leading out of its four sides, but again there was very little actually in the room: a couple of extranet terminals were mounted on stands, and there were a few benches against the walls, but there was absolutely nothing else. Not a person, not a sound – not even an alarm. Just them.

"I realise," Garrus murmured, "that it's a cliché, but it's quiet. Too quiet."

"They may be awaiting us at a fortified position," Melenis said. "However, it seems likely that there are not a great many defenders here."

"Watch the doors," Sensat said, and moved over to one of the terminals. "I'm having a look at this."

Garrus nodded, and took up a position just to the left of one of the two doors on the right-hand wall, pressing up against it to watch the opposite side of the room, where Erash and Sidonis were doing the same thing. As Sensat activated the terminal, his face was bathed in a warm orange glow by its light, and he stared intently at it for a few seconds.

"This is... there's only one file," he said, almost to himself. "Everything else is wiped."

"What is it?" Garrus said. "Might just be a roster, or something. They wouldn't need many files on consoles like this-"

"No," Sensat said curtly. "This is something else. It's a video file. It's called 'Hello'."

"I don't like the sound of that," Erash said, abandoning his position to come up and look over Sensat's shoulder. Sidonis followed him, and Garrus found himself wandering over as well until they were all crowded around the terminal as Sensat opened the file.

Immediately, a full-screen HD vid started up. On the screen, occupying almost all of it, was the face of a turian. His skin was a lighter brown than Garrus's own, almost rust-red in its complexion, with minimalist, hard-edged tattoos running up it in two strips of straight white lines. They were much less prominent than you'd see on most turians, and they definitely weren't from any colony or clan Garrus recognised. The design wasn't the usual sort, that was for sure; most markings were usually quite extensive, running across much of the face with the largest and still a considerable amount of it with the more restrained ones, but this was a simple, mechanical design. Staring out of the face were a pair of cold green eyes, eyes that were staring straight at the camera and thus straight into the eyes of the viewer. As he looked into them, Garrus began to feel distinctly uneasy.

Sidonis squinted at it, and looked over at Sensat. "Is that-"

"Deus," the batarian confirmed.

"Hello, Sensat," the turian said. The low, smooth voice coming out of the speakers was polite, refined, and utterly devoid of any organic warmth. "You're back, I see."

Sensat hissed through his teeth as Deus spoke his name, and all four of his eyes took on a glint of cold, quiet rage.

"You will not stop me," Deus continued. "Do you realise that? You've had your little victories earlier, but that's all you'll have. I commend you for getting this far so quickly, although I suppose it's no more than I expected. After all, I know exactly what you're capable of. And you know what I'm capable of. Thanks to you, I can do everything you could and more. Manus Dei has been ordered not to kill you if it is at all possible, although I doubt circumstances will allow that. I want you alive to see what I'm building. I want you to look on the galaxy I create and to know that it was you, _you_ who let me do this. You should consider it an honour. It is not one I will extend to your allies. They will die. You may not. I hope you do not. You deserve to see the fruits of my labour, no matter the damage you've dealt elsewhere. It truly is... magnificent. A work of God, you might call it."

At that, a thin, icy smile spread across Deus's face, and Garrus shivered.

"The dawn of a new era is upon us, my friend. I look forward to seeing you again. I recommend surrender, but I know you won't."

The screen cut to black, and there was silence for a few second. Then, Sensat raised one armoured fist and smashed it down hard on the terminal, crushing the metal casing and the delicate electronics into scrap in a shower of sparks.

_So, that was Deus. Smug. Arrogant, actually. That's good. An arrogant enemy is always more likely to make mistakes._

"We move on," Sensat said quietly. "Straight ahead. No delay." He got no argument.

They left the room by the door directly opposite the one they'd come in by, entering another long stretch of blank corridor. They'd slowed to a walk by some unconscious agreement, and Garrus was expecting two dozen heavily-armoured troopers to come charging around the corner ahead any second, but nothing came. He couldn't hear anything but their footsteps, and there was nothing but an empty wall in the scope of his rifle.

"I don't like this," Sidonis muttered to his left. "There's nothing. Nothing!"

"He has to want us somewhere," Erash said. "A trap, or an ambush or something."

"It's his territory," Sensat said. "We have no choice but to spring it."

"On the bright side," Garrus said, "it probably means he can't afford to just throw troops at us. That means he's got limited numbers."

"Yeah, but 'limited numbers' for this guy probably only means he's got, like, forty guys instead of a hundred," Sidonis said darkly. "And that's not forgetting-"

"Mechs!" Melenis called suddenly, and Garrus cursed how easily he'd been distracted as he turned his attention back to the corridor. It stretched on for another fifteen metres, and sure enough several standard LOKI mechs were marching stiffly around it, cradling high-power assault rifles in their bony metal arms. Melenis was the first to fire, his opening five-shot burst smashing straight into the heavy chest area of the first of the mechs to turn the corner, but Garrus wasn't far behind, and he fired three rounds as soon as his crosshair rested on a target.

It was the second one around the corner, and his first shot probably would have been enough to disable it, punching into the innards of the mech in a spray of white sparks and twisted bits of scrap metal. The second one finished the job, hitting just a couple of centimetres above the first and destroying what was left of the central mechanics. As it started to fall, he used the slump and the recoil of his rifle to raise his crosshair for the last shot, and it obliterated the mech's head in a small, sharp explosion. Then Sidonis, Erash and Sensat all opened up almost as one, and a blistering rain of fire poured down the corridor as more and more mechs started appearing.

The LOKI mech was the galaxy's new krogan. The krogans had been forced to abandon their traditional method of warfare, which was defined by the basic line of military history textbooks as 'being numerous and loud', after the genophage had put an end to their limitless reinforcements in the Rebellions, but there would always be a role for sheer overwhelming numbers. The mechs were dumb, they could barely shoot straight, they couldn't take much punishment and they were disturbingly prone to malfunctions in their target parameters, but they were cheap to buy and cheaper to make. Ten mechs could be used for the same price as one organic soldier, even if that soldier could probably take them all by himself, but against untrained opposition they were often devastating simply by the volume of fire they could lay down. _Against people who hold the arcane knowledge of how to hold a gun the right way round, however... _

Their fire was demolishing one of them with what seemed like every shot, and the floor at the end of the corridor was becoming littered with debris from detonating robotic bodies, but there were dozens of them coming around that corner, and they were doing it four abreast. Garrus cursed again and quickly switched from his sniper to his assault rifle as another wave of them blew up at the same time as two more waves marched in, and opened fire again. He didn't even have to pick a target; he could have even closed his eyes and fired blind and scored just as many hits. Five assault rifles firing at once was enough to tear the LOKIs apart almost instantly, but they just kept coming, and they were starting to get some of their own shots off. Garrus reeled as a few bounced off his kinetic barriers, depleting them by a quarter, before sending the last five bursts in his clip down the corridor to scrap three more of the mechs. Five more were there to replace them; the corridor meant that they would only ever be facing five or six guns at once, but it also meant that even LOKI mechs couldn't miss, and shields wouldn't last forever.

"Fall back!" he shouted over the rattling guns and short snaps of exploding mechs. "We can't take them here!"

"Correct," Melenis said, amplifying his voice rather than shouting, and started backing away with Garrus, still firing. Garrus reloaded, dropping his thermal clip entirely rather than saving it to cool down later, and opened up again, but they were barely making a dent. He'd never seen mechs deployed in numbers like these before, and there were still more coming as the mass of metal advanced towards them – they had to have dropped at least twenty, maybe thirty, but they were coming in droves. The sheer firepower was overwhelming, and Garrus grunted as more shots hammered into his shields, fizzling out before they could get past but doing nasty amounts of damage to the little blue bar his visor was showing him to represent his shield levels. The little numbers beneath it read: **34%**

"Too many!" Sidonis snarled. "Too fucking _many!_"

Garrus shot a glance over his shoulder as he slotted a third fresh clip into his rifle. They had just ten metres left until they were back in the relatively safety of the larger room, but even as he looked another few rounds jabbed at him, and his shields disappeared entirely. One of the shots got through, but it landed right in the middle of the chest, the most fortified section of the armour. All it did was drive him back and wind him a little, but a few more of those would put pay to him, and they would come in before they escaped at this rate.

_So change the rate._

"_Run!_" he called, putting as much command as he could into his voice, and turned tail. He didn't like doing it, but the mechs' advance was inexorable, and there simply wasn't another option. He kept his head low as he ran to shield his head, and inside a couple of seconds he was through the door and peeling away to the left and out of the line of fire as the others followed suit, Melenis coming through last, still firing one-handed behind him before he dodged right and out of the fire zone.

"Erash," Sensat said from next to Garrus as the mechs' fire died, "what have you got?"

"Just the thing," the salarian said, and smiled evilly. He dropped a hand to the belt of capsules slung around his waist and selected a larger one, before tensing himself and dashing across the still-open door to the corridor full of mechs. Halfway across, he wrenched it open, grabbed the malleable white mass inside and hurled it at the oncoming robots before diving out of the instant storm of fire that erupted out of the door when he came into the LOKIs' sight. He scrambled up next to Sensat and Garrus, and entered a command on his omnitool.

"Fire in the hole!" he called, and Garrus clasped his right hand to the visorless side of his head. The twenty-year-old military implants in his aural passageways would stop any real physical damage from noise, but big explosions would still give him a hell of headache from this range, and he'd had enough of those for one day.

The explosion was earth-shaking, a massive harsh _boom_ that sent a tongue of flame spearing out of the entrance to the corridor, bearing with it several disintegrating mechs in pieces no larger than Garrus's fist. It overloaded a dozen power batteries, causing a series of explosive cracks as mechs cooked off and added to the devastating blast.

As soon as the blast had dissipated, Garrus rolled out of cover and opened fire on the newly decimated force, and the others followed his lead. The corridor was an absolute ruin; the ceiling and walls had both bulged outwards from the sheer force of the explosion, leaving thick black scorch marks all around the epicentre. Shredded piles of red-hot machinery had been blasted across the entire length of the hallway, and circuit boards crunched underfoot as they advanced, their fire obliterating the last few mechs. Almost every single one of them had been wasted by the makeshift grenade, the tightness of the corridor, their closely-packed ranks and the power of the explosion combining to smash most of them to pieces, with only ten or so left standing in the last few rows. They went down inside ten seconds.

A couple of seconds after twenty direct hits ripped the very last mech to sparking shreds, all fire ceased. Garrus kept his gun to his shoulder, still watching the corridor in case there had been any stragglers, but nothing more emerged. The last mech's legs, which were more or less all that was left of it, toppled to the floor to add themselves to the chaotic mess of destroyed robotics that was entirely covering it.

Ten seconds passed, all eyes fixed ferociously on the corner, but there was no sound but occasional quiet sparking from the brutalised carpet of machinery, and still nothing came around.

"Clear," Garrus said, after what seemed like an age, and slotted a fresh thermal clip into his assault rifle before switching back to his sniper. "That's all of them."

"You said he wasn't just going to throw troops at us," Sidonis said accusingly.

"Well, I didn't know he had mechs, did I?" Garrus said. "You'd have expected to see them used earlier."

"He doesn't use mechs, though," Sensat said, as they started to pick their way through the sea of broken parts. "That's not his style. He only uses turians."

"Might be he really is short on numbers, then," Erash mused. "Or maybe they were just meant to slow us down."

"He can't have expected them to finish us," Garrus said, kicking an intact head out of the way with one armoured boot. "He'd have used them at the same time as regular troops if he'd really wanted to just overwhelm us. He must have known he was just throwing away firepower."

"Or he underestimated us," Sensat said. "Possible, certainly."

Garrus shook his head. "We've shown him what we're capable of. There's no way he wouldn't see us as a serious threat."

"You'd be surprised," Sensat said. "You're thinking of him as a rational mind. Don't be fooled by the mask. He genuinely believes he is better than the rest of the galaxy, and that colours everything he does."

"He'd still have used _some_ of his troops, though. There's a trap ahead," Garrus warned.

"So noted."

They came to the scarred, hole-riddled end of the corridor, past and wheeled around into the next, the corridor the mechs had come from. This one was shorter, ending in a single round door ten metres ahead.

Garrus moved up and took up a position on the right of the door, joined by Melenis as the other three took the left. The control was on the right, and Garrus dropped one hand to it.

"Ready?" he said, glancing across. He got a chorus of murmured assent and nods in response, and pressed the button.

As the door split and hissed open, he rolled out of cover, rifle at his shoulder, but the room beyond was empty of both life and mechs. Yet again, it didn't have much else; a few crates were piled up against one wall to the left and a single computer terminal was on the right, but there was nothing else but a single door set into the wall ahead.

"Watch the door," Garrus said, seeing Sensat set out for the terminal again. "Sidonis, make sure they don't sneak up behind us."

"Got it," Sidonis said, and stepped back to cover the last corridor as the others focused on the door ahead. A soft amber light lit up as Sensat activated the terminal.

"Is it just that message again?" Erash said, without looking around.

"...no," Sensat said, after a moment. "No, this one is encrypted."

"Can you hack it?" Garrus said.

Sensat snorted. "Might as well ask if an asari can dance. This is simple stuff. It looks like a regular terminal. He probably only bothered to rig the ones in the central room with his little greeting..."

His voice trailed off as his four eyes flickered over the data scrolling in tightly-packed orange lines across the screen, and his fingers danced on the virtual keyboard it projected.

"...standard encryption protocol," he muttered to himself, barely audible. "Simple. Simple- got it."

Glancing across, Garrus saw the code on the screen vanish and a sleek white OS start up in its place. Sensat started opening files, flicking the open tabs to the side of the screen as he opened more and more of them, sorting through them at a speed that Garrus would barely have been able to start scanning them at. He shrugged, and turned back to watching the door.

Fifteen seconds passed in silence before Sensat made a rumbling noise of triumph in the back of his throat. "Well, well. We have a map. Uploading now."

Garrus's mail icon blinked again in his visor, and he opened the message with a flick of his eye. A basic 2D floorplan emerged, seen from the top down and drawn with sharply cornering white lines. One room contained a small red dot indicating where they were at the moment, but that wasn't what drew his eye. The plan was conventional enough for the first part, divided into reasonably-sized rooms and corridors, but past the area they were standing in there was one further corridor that led into a gigantic open area, hundreds of metres on each side. It dwarfed every other feature on the map, at least twice their total size, but the plan gave away no clue as to what was inside it. Garrus could guess well enough. _His ship. That's a big enough space to put one together up to the size of a large cruiser._

"No labels that I can find," Sensat continued, still searching through the files on the terminal as Erash and Sidonis called up omnitool displays to check the map. "Probably aren't any. Operational security means they're keeping it to just a basic map, but that's enough for now."

Sidonis whistled as the map popped up on his miniature holographic screen. "That's a big room."

"It is," Erash agreed. "Drydock?"

"Without a doubt," Sensat said, and powered the terminal down. "Nothing more that's significant. Looks like it's mostly for the benefit of the guards."

"So what's our game plan?" Garrus asked, still looking over the map. "An open space would benefit them if they've got numbers over us. They'd just have to pump enough fire in."

"Wouldn't be open," Erash said, "not if they're building a starship there. There'll be all sorts of crates and heavy machinery and stuff like that. That benefits us, 'cause these guys really don't seem to understand the concept of cover. We've got a chance if it comes to that."

"They know we're coming, though," Garrus countered. "They won't get drawn into a basic cover shootout. Not if they're smart." As he finished speaking, he trailed off a little, realising what he'd said. Military training had instilled in him the basic idea that your enemy understood how to fight, but the troops they'd faced down so far, as Erash had said, hadn't been great soldiers. _What if we're overestimating what we're facing? Deus is arrogant, so arrogant that he didn't even bother to wipe the map from the terminal, and his troops may be well-equipped but they're about vorcha-level in terms of tactics. They might not be anything like the threat we'd thought they were..._

"They're not smart," Erash said. "There's no delegation. It all comes down to Deus, and he's not as good as he thinks he is. We're outnumbered, but we can outsmart them easily."

Sensat nodded. "We're not facing a coherent force. If we were, we'd have lost long ago. He threw mechs at us for no good tactical reason. We move ahead into the main hangar, but cautiously, in case we're wrong – but I doubt it. Deus is good, but I'm better."

Garrus hesitated for a moment before replying. Something about it felt very off to him, but the stims buzzing in his head and the general craziness of the last day were reason enough for that, and he had to admit that their analysis of the situation did make sense. _I've never even met Deus, and I've only known about him for a few hours. Have to trust their judgement._

"OK," he said to Sensat. "We'll play it your way. Your op."

"Good to hear it," the batarian said curtly, and stepped away from the terminal and towards the door they'd been covering. "Let's be about it."

The five of them clustered around the door as it opened, guns at the ready just in case there were targets beyond, but there was just yet another corridor, ten metres long and ending in a standard round door. It was the basic industrial model you saw everywhere from the Presidium itself to the most lawless areas of Terminus, but when Garrus saw it it seemed to be oddly final in some intangible way, representing the last barrier between them and the last battle. His heart had been blasting away like he was running a marathon since he'd taken those stims, but now it seemed to intensify its beat even further as they took up positions around the door.

"Get into cover as soon as possible," Sensat said quietly, hovering his hand over the door control. "We may need it. Ready?"

Four murmured assents.

Sensat glanced at them quickly, his face betraying nothing, and pressed the door release. The two halves split apart and they stormed into the room, weapons primed and ready to fire, but before he'd taken two steps in Garrus knew something was wrong.

His mind took in the form of the vast shape towering well over fifty metres upwards towards the distant ceiling and dismissed it as something to think about later, but the way he saw it was what gave him pause. The map had indicated that they would emerge straight into the enormous hangar area, but this wasn't right; they'd come out into an empty room about thirty metres across, although the end of it was open onto the vast space beyond, looking out onto the ship he'd ignored for the moment. Up on the left and right and extending over the gap at the end of the room was a walkway at about six metres up, a set of stairs on the right leading up to it. Several doors opened onto it, leading into rooms that simply weren't on the map that was blinking in Garrus's HUD.

"This is wrong," Sensat said urgently, skidding to a halt on the metal floor, "this is _wrong!_"

"This wasn't on the damn map," Erash spat, frantically scanning the walkway for any sign of a threat. "Trap?"

"Let's get out of here," Garrus said to Sensat, and he could hear the anxiety in his own voice. _I knew something was wrong..._

"Agreed," Sensat said shortly, and turned for the door as it slammed shut behind them. When he pressed the control, nothing happened.

"What's the matter?" Sidonis said. "Open it! Open it!"

"I can't," Sensat snarled, and called up his omnitool. "It's locked itself. I can hack-"

There was a sharp _bang _and a blinding flash of white light as the door control exploded outwards in a shower of scrap metal and sparks, and Sensat reeled back, clutching his forearm.

"It's fused," he snapped, and a thrill of realisation ran straight through Garrus's heart. _Damn it, he wanted us here, and we walked right into it! We thought he left the map out of arrogance, but we were too bloody confident-_

All that ran through his mind in a flash as he was turning back to the room, and then suddenly there was movement on the walkway above – troopers, he realised, in full heavy armour – and raised his rifle automatically as they poured out of the doors to the sides. He locked onto one target with his visor and fired four rounds in quick succession, expecting they would at least bring down the target's kinetic barriers and deal some damage, but another shock hit him as he watched his shots suddenly explode into blue fizzles about a metre short of the walkway. Instantly, his visor identified the kinetic barriers a quick sweep of his head confirmed were enclosing all the room outside the walkways, and his breath caught in his throat as he saw the estimated power level pop up in his HUD. _That's as powerful as a damn cruiser's main shields!_

The troopers were continuing to emerge - there had to be thirty or forty of them - but they weren't firing back, only waiting, standing to attention as soon as they found a place along the walkway. The others had opened fire as Garrus's shots had hit the barriers, but their shots were petering out as they understood just how powerful a kinetic barrier they were facing, and soon there was silence as the last troops filed into the room and snapped to attention. His visor identified forty-one separate targets spaced along the overhanging platforms, each of them helmeted turians in identical heavy grey armour, and the heavy weight of realisation hung in his chest as he took them in. _Suckered. And we've lost. All because we were too damn sure of ourselves._

Sidonis gave a small but heartfelt groan. "Ah, _fuck._"

"Trap," Erash said heavily, and threw his assault rifle on the floor in disgust. It clattered loudly, the sound echoing out into the huge room beyond. "We walked right into it."

Sensat said nothing, but when he glanced over at him Garrus could see pure, unbridled fury in all four of his dark eyes as he slowly stopped tapping in whatever command he'd been entering into his omnitool.

"What are you waiting for, then?" Garrus said out loud, calling out to nobody in particular as he desperately tried to think of a way out of the situation. _Make a run for the way out into the main hangar? They'd drop us before we got halfway..._ "What are you afraid of?"

Nobody responded, but one of the doors on the right slid open again, and another figure walked out, this one different from the others: its armour was lighter, though done in the same industrial grey, and it didn't wear a helmet. Instead, rust-coloured skin and geometric white tattoos were visible as the figure stepped up to the railing at the edge of the walkway and leaned over, regarding them with cold green eyes, eyes that Garrus could see – even from fifteen, twenty metres away – were utterly empty of emotion. Garrus had seen seen that look before. Every C-Sec officer had, once they'd worked a few homicide cases. Some murders were committed out of passion, or in panic or even for money, and you could understand them, at least. Then you got the sociopaths. The people who'd kill because it made them feel good, or because they honestly saw no reason not to, and when you caught them they'd look at you with cold, dead eyes. Eyes like those glinting a venomous green in the turian's face above as he looked down on them like a hanging judge passing sentence.

"Good evening," Deus said.


	20. Divine Intervention: Endgame, Part Two

**DIVINE INTERVENTION**

**THIRTEEN: ENDGAME, PART TWO

* * *

**

"Hello, Deus," Sensat said coldly, looking up at the turian leaning over the railing. "I see you've learned."

"And I see you haven't," Deus said. "As I expected. My trap was simple, but you came barrelling in as you and your... companions-" he pronounced it as if the word itself was dirty, Garrus noted "-always do. It's quite ingenious, really."

"It would be," Sensat said.

"You see," Deus went on, "the kinetic barriers around you are being projected directly from the shield generator of my ship. Nothing short of a nuclear assault could possibly break through them from where you're standing, but for my men, you're nothing but a shooting gallery. You may as well follow the lead of your salarian friend and drop your weapons. They're of no use to you now."

Slowly, deliberately, Erash knelt down and picked his assault rifle up from the floor where he'd thrown it. Nobody else moved to drop theirs.

Deus's mouth twitched in annoyance at that, but Garrus saw him carefully clamp down on it and return his face to an impassive mask. "Very well. It will not change anything. Keep them if you wish. Incidentally, is that a volus?"

"Yes," Melenis said simply.

Deus shrugged. "Strange days indeed. Reports came back indicating that my men were fighting some sort of deformed krogan or a prototype mech. Leading the curve again, I see, Sensat. Perhaps I will co-opt that design as well. After all, I was always so good at improving on your best efforts."

His every word was dripping with a dismissive, superior disdain, and for the life of him Garrus couldn't work out if he was doing it intentionally to gloat or if it was just the way he spoke. He had a feeling it was a mixture of the two, but he couldn't be sure; when Deus had control of his face, he looked absolutely blank apart from the eyes. He couldn't disguise the iciness in them, no matter how well he could control the rest.

"So that's you, is it?" Sensat said acidly. "Standing on the shoulders of giants and claiming you're better than them?"

Deus chuckled, a rough, rasping noise, and pushed himself back from the rail he'd been leaning over. "So bitter. You shouldn't be. You're serving a great cause, Sensat: my cause. You should consider it an honour that I haven't killed you yet."

Sensat growled quietly in the back of his throat, a menacing rumble that put Garrus's teeth on edge, but he said nothing.

"Do you like what you see?" Deus went on, gesturing towards the end of the room and the enormous shape beyond it. "A magnificent piece of technology, don't you think?"

For the first time, Garrus properly took stock of what he'd been seeing; before, it had just been an irrelevance, but now he could appreciate the sheer scale of the thing. It was a distinctively turian design, from the small midsection of it that he could see: a massive gun-metal-coloured block of durasteel and ablative plates that stretched up and up like a building turned on its side, covered in yellow scaffolding and gantries that housed the enormous machines putting it together. It had to be the size of a cruiser or bigger still, a simply massive undertaking for anything short of an actual military shipyard. The size of the thing meant that he could only see part of its length through the open end of the room they stood in, but from what he could see the exterior was very nearly complete, with only the very top sections not being fully covered yet. The way most starships were built was an 'all in one' method, in which the interior's basic systems were constructed alongside the hull, and that meant that it could be operational – _entirely _operational – inside less than a month. The thought of it would have been bad enough if Garrus hadn't known it also contained the ADAPT system, but with that caveat it became nothing short of terrifying. _We had to destroy this. _Had_ to. And we've failed._

"It'll be complete within three weeks," Deus said, pride suffusing his voice, "and I hope to move forwards within two months. These are exciting times, Sensat. A great restructuring is at hand."

"What is it you _want_, Jullan?" Sensat burst out. "What is it-"

"Do not call me that," Deus said blandly. "That is not my name. My name is Deus."

His tone had been calm, but Garrus thought he'd sensed something beneath the surface, something... ugly. It might have just been a thought, but he involuntarily took a half-step back anyway. _Some things are better left unseen._

"Fine, _Deus_," Sensat said, "what do you want? What are you trying to do?"

"What any reasonable person wants to do," Deus said evenly. "I want a better galaxy. I'm trying to change it for the better. Let me ask you a question. What is it that makes our galaxy so broken? What is it that makes us fight amongst ourselves, what is it that allows corruption and crime to run rampant? Are we not better than this? Should we not have transcended such pettiness as we took to the stars? Yet our utopia remains intangible, our tenuous hold on civilisation remains under threat. Rachni, krogan, geth – all of them very nearly destroyed everything we ever built. We are a galaxy divided, and divided we will fall. It's this division that poisons everything we ever do, that colours it with spilt blood and stops us from progressing any further. It is this division I seek to destroy."

"You're insane," Sensat said flatly.

"Insane?" Deus said curiously, as if considering the possibility for the first time. "If you define sanity as blind adherence to a fatally flawed status quo, then yes, I am insane. But I see more clearly than any of you, than any_one_. I know what must be done, and I'm called insane for daring to do it. It's almost comedic."

He paused, and then placed both gloved hands on the rail again. "Consider unity. Consider the Protheans. The Protheans were the greatest civilisation this galaxy has ever known. I asked why. They ruled the galaxy, alone and absolute, they possessed technology far beyond our wildest dreams – they even built the Citadel!"

_Well, that's not actually true._

"In short," Deus went on, "they set the bar. I wish to raise that bar."

"The Protheans died," Sensat said flatly. "They stagnated and died and left nothing but ancient relics."

"Did they?" Deus said, although he seemed to be asking himself more than anything. "Perhaps. Or maybe they found another level of existence. It's a moot point. They were greater than our broken galaxy could ever dream to be, whether or not they died, and I know why. They were the only space-faring race at the time. They possessed absolute unity, with no exterior threats and total societal cohesion. That is what made them great. Consider history: we are a galaxy of many races, and in each of these races we see war. Conflict. Their histories are drenched with blood, and even now we live in a galaxy ruled by the gun and the bullet. So many species, and so many divisions within species... I wonder how many more attacks we could survive? What if the rachni had overrun us and brought ruin to the galaxy? What if the krogan had done the same? The geth came so close to ending everything, yet still we amble on in a self-delusional haze, somehow believing that we are _safe_. That everything will be alright. That we are _stable_. Lies! All of it, lies and grand delusions and fairytales, and that's what will cost us when the next great threat emerges. Thrice the galaxy has come to the very brink of the abyss, and three times we've been saved at the last. The krogan stopped the rachni. The salarians and turians stopped the krogan. The humans stopped the geth. Each time, we've needed something new to defeat the threat. There are precious few new frontiers left to us. How long will it be before we lose our footing forever?"

"So you want to create a galaxy with only one race," Sensat said in disgust. "Allow me to guess which. Turian."

"There is simply no other logical choice," Deus said smoothly. "What other options are available? Asari? They live for a millennium. They are stagnant. Arrogant. Their time has passed. The salarians? The opposite. Their lives are short and chaotic, their politics volatile and unstable. Humans? Humans are too fresh. They blunder about the galaxy, putting their feet into everything, and their habit of antagonising everyone they meet is hardly conducive to good society. Krogans? Savages. Quarians? A broken race. Your own people? Brutes. Volus, drell, elcor, hanar? Eclectic and weak. The turian race is only held in check by the others on the Council. We are the race that does not err too far one way or another, those committed to the middle way, to loyalty, strength, honour! Our lifespans are not extreme, nor our politics. However, I freely admit, we are by no means perfect. No race is. Yet."

He left the last word hanging in the air like a hook, and he let those sepulchral eyes sweep over them one more time before continuing.

"The turian physiology is, on balance, the best foundation," he said. "But inside, we are no paragons. Think on our history. Civil war blackens our past, and even now we wear the shameful marks of divisive individualism on our very faces as if to boast of the fact. Even now, though it calls itself the government of all turians, the Hierarchy knows it does not provide total unity. As a race we remain too conservative, in deference to a broken old order. It is clear to me that this must change, but how?"

_He's insane. He sounds so rational when he speaks, but when you listen to what he's saying... even Saren was understandable in what he wanted. Deus is mad, right to the core._

"The answer comes from an unlikely source," Deus was saying. "Humans. A new race, and one which many would say is too brash, expanding terrifyingly fast. They truly are incredible. Are you aware that it is barely two centuries since they first launched a chemical rocket to their home planet's moon? Barely more since they created their first electronic computer? Even with the boost of Prothean technology, that is nothing short of extraordinary. When the Relay 314 Incident occurred, I fought on the front lines, on Shanxi itself. We believed we were fighting against nothing more than a group of technological illiterates, a disorganised rabble whose resistance would be shattered easily. How wrong we were. Shanxi opened my eyes, for the humans were _driven_; they were fighting with absolutely everything they had against us, because they were presenting one solid front. We couldn't compete, even with all our tactics, our technology. Unity of purpose will always triumph; strength of will can crush strength of arms. I saw then that humans were going to be a major force in the galaxy and soon, simply because they gave everything they had. I made billions upon billions of credits by buying shares in every new interstellar human company I could find, and they proved me right. Today, their economy is booming even in the midst of a galactic recession! Such drive! Such energy! As a race, turians have lost that. We are fractured and will remain so forever, unless a fundamental change is made. I will unite the turian race once and for all, and we will eliminate every obstacle that stands in the way. Deus Vult. God wills it. A human phrase, from their ancient Crusades. A tiny army, outnumbered and in hostile land, fought to an incredible victory because they were driven, driven by their faith in a deity. We can only reclaim what is our right if we have that same drive."

Deus spread his arms wide, and when he spoke his voice rang with a dreadful triumph.

"I am Deus. The turian race will be the only one in the galaxy, and I will rule. I will build a new foundation, I will erase all that has gone before, and we will all become as gods."

There was a long silence, and Deus slowly lowered his arms back to his sides, breathing hard, eyes shining brightly.

"You," Garrus said eventually, and Deus's eyes flicked over to him, narrowing slightly as he spoke, "are insane. You can't possibly think you can actually do this, can you?"

"With the ADAPT system at my command," Deus said, "I can remove every non-turian from a planet in a matter of hours. It is the ultimate tool of racial cleansing."

"And you think that you can just murder your way to godhood?" Garrus said, and a cold diamond edge of fury entered his voice as he spoke. "You think they won't stop you? I'll tell you what will happen. You won't become a god, you won't change anything. You'd do this to a few planets, maybe kill ten billion, and then you'll be taken down. Even if there were nobody left but turians in the galaxy, you'd be seen as a monster. You wouldn't be seen as a god. You'd go down in the history textbooks as the greatest monster who ever lived, a common murderer. Your name would be the byword for evil for thousands of years, and all you'll have accomplished is to kill billions of people who deserve so much better than a bastard like you. You have one ship. That's not enough to do anything, no matter what you believe. You will fail, and you'll die. You're nothing but a madman, raving at the universe for, for, for no reason! You're doing it for nothing! You're delusional!"

His voice was rising to a shout by the end, and when he'd finished every set of eyes in the room was on him, and he was breathing hard. It got a longer silence, and Garrus could feel his body temperature falling as Deus's eyes narrowed to slits and fixed on him. When he spoke, however, it wasn't what Garrus was expecting.

"I know you," Deus said slowly. "I recognise your face... Garrus Vakarian?"

"Look, this is ridiculous," Garrus said irritably. "Is there _anyone_ involved in this damn thing who doesn't know who I am?"

"You fought at the Battle of the Citadel," Deus went on, ignoring him. "You were with the team which put down Saren, were you not?"

Garrus nodded silently, and Deus, to his surprise, suddenly gave an exuberant, whooping laugh. "Garrus Vakarian! What are the odds? I've been wanting to see you for months, and you walk right through my door! Oh, that's wonderful! It's a small galaxy after all, I suppose."

"Why would you want to see me?" Garrus asked, putting just a little emphasis on the 'you'. It was meant to convey distaste, but Deus, a disturbingly wide smile splitting his face, didn't even seem to notice.

"Because you're good," he said. "Because you're exactly the sort of person I want on my side. You've shown that well enough over the last day, haven't you? I'd been looking for a way to contact you ever since Saren's defeat, but you disappeared entirely two months later. I'd written you off as dead, but here you are, alive and well. The universe never ceases to amaze. But I've been gifted this opportunity, and I won't let it go to waste. Garrus. I want you to join me."

"Join you?" Garrus said incredulously. "Really?"

"Don't do it," Sensat hissed behind him.

"Why?" Sidonis said. "I'd do it."

Sensat stared at him in shock. "What?"

"Well, we're pretty much dead anyway," Sidonis said philosophically. "Might as well. Couldn't hurt, anyway."

"No god rules alone," Deus intoned, still staring straight at Garrus with those piercing green eyes. "They have their servants, their soldiers, their messengers. I will tell you this: before this year is out, I will rule supreme over the stars, at the head of the last race in the galaxy. I'm offering you the chance to become my right-hand man. You've created several openings in my personnel over the last few hours, if you hadn't noticed. I want you. I need you. Join me, Garrus, and we will rule over all. Join the winning side. Be my... archangel."

"You're serious," Garrus said, after a pause. "You're actually serious. You really think that I'll join you on your insane little quest. Well, no. Never. You're insane. You've betrayed every turian ideal – no, you've betrayed _every_ ideal under the suns, and the worst part is that you think you're doing the right thing! You're so deluded you can't even imagine why I wouldn't join you! I'd rather die than be an accessory to genocide. I don't say this often, so understand that I really, _really_ mean it: go fuck yourself."

There was a painfully long silence, quiet enough that Garrus could hear every tiny creak of machinery in the background, every shuffle and cleared throat from the soldiers lining the walkways as Deus stared at him, knuckles tight on the railing in front of him and eyes burning with a venomous cold fire.

"So be it," Deus said at last, and the fury in his voice was there for all to hear, barely controlled and ready to rage out of control like wildfire. "You could have had it all, Garrus."

"If it's you offering," Garrus said, "I wouldn't want it."

"You won't live to see how wrong you are." Deus regarded him for a couple of seconds more, eyes suddenly filled with loathing, then switched his gaze to Sensat. "Sensat. Will you surrender, or will you choose to die here, like an animal?"

"The shorter amount of time the two of us are both alive, the better," Sensat said calmly. "I won't give you the satisfaction of showing me how you've perverted my designs."

"I'm good for surrender," Sidonis said, raising a hand. "Can I do that archangel thing, or is that-"

"Who are you?" Deus said, as if noticing him for the first time. _Probably only just has, actually._

"Uh, Sidonis," Sidonis said uneasily, shrinking under Deus's glare. "Lantar Sidonis-"

"Not interested," Deus said dismissively. "You can die."

"Oh, great," Sidonis said bitterly. "Thanks a fucking lot. Some racist you are. If you must know, I was actually going to agree to help you and then stab you in the back, like _someone else_ should have done."

"Ah, shut up, Sidonis," Garrus murmured.

"You are of no further use to me," Deus said, and stepped back from the railing again. "Kill them. Kill all of them."

As one, the guards stepped forwards, bringing assault rifles to bear, and Garrus closed his eyes and braced for the inevitable. _Well,_ he consoled himself, _at least I got this far. Saved the galaxy once, had a damn good go at doing it again. Not bad._

"Wait!" Sensat called suddenly, and Garrus's eyes snapped open again. The batarian was stepping out into the middle of the room, his left hand raised in what might have been a gesture of surrender if he hadn't still been carrying a heavy assault rifle in the other hand. "Deus! Wait!"

"...do not fire," Deus said, and the guards lowered their assault rifles a little. "What now? Ready to come crawling to me, begging for forgiveness?"

"No," Sensat said, "nothing like that. It's just... that you're so stupid."

Deus blinked in surprise at the insult, as did Garrus. _What the hell is he playing at?_

"Circumstances would seem to prove you wrong," Deus said. "Is childish name-calling your last trick? You've given me enough of that already."

"Well," Sensat said, "you're arrogant. So were we, but you've made mistakes. Big ones. Assumptions are dangerous, Deus. I wonder why, even after I've broken out of your prison, you still seem to think your systems are secure?"

_He didn't._

_Did he?_

"What are you saying?" Deus said tersely. "I'm busy. Speak quickly or don't."

"Well, I've had a little program running for the last... oh, five minutes," Sensat said, an ugly edge of vindictive triumph seeping into his voice, "ever since I saw the kinetic barriers you're hiding behind. A worm. And it should mean that in... wait for it... _now_, I'll be able to do _this_."

_He did?_

He tapped a single command into his omnitool, and there was a sudden blue flash all around the room as the massive kinetic barriers between them and Deus's troops rebooted. Deus recoiled as if he'd been physically struck as he saw the shields change, shocked disbelief written over every inch of his face.

"What did you do?" he said, and panic was starting to seep into his voice. "_What did you do?_"

"I changed the status quo," Sensat said smugly, and raised his assault rifle. "Like I said. You're good. _I'm better._"

He opened fire, and his bullets howled straight through the kinetic barrier that had been there a few seconds before to smash themselves to atoms on Deus's personal shields. There was a moment of stunned inaction, and then Deus reeled back from the shots, shields still intact but taking damage, as Garrus's rifle came up to his shoulder seemingly of its own accord and fired three times. Deus had reacted quickly, spinning and heading for the door behind him, but Garrus's second and third shots both hit home, the last blow killing the shields before Deus dived through the door, which slammed shut behind him. All around them, the troops on the walkway were belatedly starting to open fire, thrown by the sudden change in the situation, but every single one of their shots was hitting the kinetic barrier and dissipating even as Melenis, Erash and Sidonis opened up and shot clean through it. What had been a deadly trap in one direction had suddenly sprung in the other: from the ground, they could fire at will, but on the walkway the kinetic barrier was presenting its ionised side, preventing any fire from getting through. Some of the troopers were trying to lean forwards and get past the barriers, but they'd been set up more than a metre away from the railing, and they just couldn't reach.

Garrus couldn't believe his luck. He kept on firing and dropped three with the next ten shots, moving swiftly from target to target as each fell, the first two with bullets straight through their helmets and the third with a shot to the chest that splattered the wall behind him with a wet blue spray.

"We need to get Deus!" Sensat shouted over the sudden din, as two more went down from their fire. The troopers were panicking now, all semblance of discipline vanishing as they came under fire from an enemy they couldn't shoot back at. Their numbers meant nothing now behind that barrier, and there were only two ways down: the stairs, and jumping. It was a full six metres up, and when the first few tried it the fall invariably left them stumbling and hurt, easy pickings for one gun, let alone five. A few were rushing down the stairs, but Sidonis and Erash had already started up a layer of suppressing fire as Garrus switched to his assault rifle and started to close the distance, and the narrowness of the stairway ensured that when the first went down, bullets shredding shields, armour and organs alike, the rest were held up by the obstruction. To his right, another hapless soldier dropped down from the walkway and immediately took a crashing kick in the face from Melenis, crushing his helmet inwards with a force that could have rivalled most krogan.

Garrus hurdled the limp body that had slid down to the bottom of the stairs and charged up them, assault rifle chattering away in his hands. The stairs were narrow enough to mean only one could shoot at him at any one time, and they were already under fire and obstructed by the bodies at their feet. The first one had already lost his shields before Garrus's first burst went straight through his visor, and as he fell Garrus was already pumping fire into the next one. This one was prepared enough to fire back, but he only got a few shots off – and most of them wild – before the combined fire from Garrus, Erash and Sidonis brought him down. That cleared the stairs, and it took Garrus a few precious seconds to pick his way past the bodies slumped on it, his boots almost slipping twice on the blood pooling there.

He emerged onto the walkway past the safety of the kinetic barrier, but its dimensions saved him; it was only a couple of metres wide, and they'd already wiped most of the troopers who could have stopped him. Three were still crouched by the door, trying to take cover from the fire from below, but Garrus fired first. His first barrage of three shots depleted his thermal clip but were enough to take out one, then as the other two rose in panicked surprise another took four shots to the head from Melenis on the floor, sending grey and blue bursting out of the side of the helmet and into the visor of the last trooper. That was all the advantage Garrus needed as he rushed him, and one swift, powerful and above all simple throw was enough to send the unfortunate turian crashing back into the railing and carry him over it by the sheer force with which he hit it. As belated fire started to come in from the last few left on the right side of the walkway, he skidded to a halt in front of the door Deus had escaped through and fumbled for the control, leaping through it the instant it slid open just as his shields failed.

It hissed shut behind him, and he was left standing in a clean white corridor, far smarter than the utilitarian metal that had gone before. There was only one door, positioned in the end wall five metres ahead, and he ran up to it, sure that at least some of the others would be following soon. It opened automatically and he emerged into a control room of some sort, its walls lined with the orange glow of technical terminals and a two-meter hologram of the huge, sleek cruiser Deus was building projected on a dais in the centre. On the left, a long window looked out onto the ship itself, wreathed in construction machinery. There were no other doors, but Deus seemed to have vanished.

He stepped forwards into the room, frowning, and the door closed behind him. Deus had definitely gone this way, he was sure of it, but there was nowhere to hide in the room, not unless-

Sudden movement drew his eyes, and Deus rose from behind the dais, omnitool glowing brightly on his forearm. Before Garrus could even pull the trigger, Deus pressed the last key in some kind of command, and every piece of electronics in the room died. His rifle refused to fire, and the blue glint of his visor winked out over his eye as every terminal in the room deactivated and the hologram flickered into nothingness. Even the lights went out, leaving the light from the hangar coming in through the window as the only illumination, casting the room into twilight.

_Total EMP field. Powerful, but no direction. Only a few situations where taking out _all_ the electronics will help you, and this is one of them. Guns won't work for a good ten minutes afterwards..._

"The door was overloaded too," Deus said quietly. "None of your friends will be coming to help you."

"Odd," Garrus said, and let his gun clatter to the ground. "I was about to say the same thing."

Deus's eyes narrowed. "You've changed nothing, you realise. I _will_ kill all of you. This is nothing but a temporary setback."

"Really?" Garrus said innocently, unhooking his rifle from the back of his armour. He dropped it next to the assault rifle. Neither would be of any help now; using them as clubs would just slow him down, and he'd killed a fair few people with nothing but his two hands before. "Seemed to me like your guys weren't doing so well out there."

"They are disposable," Deus said. "I can always find more. You would be surprised how easy it is. As long as I live, you have not stopped me."

"Well, we can always fix that," Garrus said. "End of the line, Deus. There's nowhere for you to run now. Your crazy little dream ends tonight."

"It's no _dream_," Deus said coldly, stepping around the holographic projector until he was standing just a metre in front of Garrus. "This is reality. This is the new order. You should have embraced it when you had the chance."

"Seems like you and I have very different definitions of 'reality'," Garrus said, and raised his lightly balled fists into the classic ready position of the Redek-Astus martial art.

"Indeed," Deus replied, and lunged.

He was fast, Garrus had to give him that. He hadn't been expecting that fist to come up anywhere near as quickly as it had, and he was barely able to get a forearm in the way, deflecting the blow to the side. He brought his right hand around like a heavy knife, scything up at Deus from below with enough power to crack his jaw in two, but Deus was already reacting, and a heavy elbow came crashing painfully into Garrus's hand before it could connect. From two lightning-fast blows and the low, taut stance he'd taken, he could recognise the form of combat Deus was using: Tothuti, a vintage turian form dating back to pre-space days in contrast to Garrus's own modern, asari-influenced technique. Tothuti emphasised speedy strikes coupled with strong defence, but it was usually meant for fighters with less raw physical strength than Deus, and that meant that almost all of his blows could be deadly if they connected properly, and _that_ meant it was time to disengage and take stock.

As his hand screamed, the armoured glove only absorbing some of the blow, he dropped into a low defensive spinning kick, enough to force Deus back a couple of paces, and he capitalised on the pause by jumping back himself until he was out of range. They began circling each other, each daring the other to make the first move. Garrus was perfectly content to let Deus make it while he tried to think of a strategy. Deus was a little shorter than him, but he was just as strong and clad in lighter armour, which meant he had an advantage in flexibility but less ability to absorb blows to the body. In theory, his Tothuti style meant he wouldn't need armour if his defences were good, but even though his armour was lighter than Garrus's, it still impeded his movements to some degree. That meant there'd be openings to exploit... assuming that Deus didn't exploit his own.

"You don't disappoint," Deus said through bared teeth. "Redek-Astus?"

"For now," Garrus said, letting the two words hang in the air ominously. It was nothing but a bluff; Redek-Astus was his best bet against Tothuti, and he wasn't so strong in other forms, but he was damned if he was going to let Deus know that.

They lapsed into silence again, still circling, and then Deus struck again. He darted forward with blinding speed, feinting to the right as he approached before unleashing a furious barrage of punches aimed at Garrus's midsection and head. Three came in hard at the weaker armour plates around his stomach and he could only block one, but before the pain registered there were blows coming in at his face. He slapped one away with a forearm but the other smashed into his chin, snapping his head back and sending agonising white light spearing through his head, but Deus had left himself open; even blind and reeling, Garrus could counterattack, and he rammed a heavy boot into Deus's knee. The plating was weak there, and he knew he'd got a good blow in as Deus snarled in pain and stumbled back a few paces. Garrus had been sent off-balance by the punches he'd taken and his own kick, enough to prevent him from following up the attack, but the pain was muted by the adrenalin pounding through his body. He regained his balance, arms briefly windmilling, and dropped back into the ready position as Deus came charging again.

This time, he went exclusively for the face, jumping high to attack from above where it would be harder to block, but Garrus had seen it coming; he dodged the first massive blow and bodily shoulder-charged Deus as he landed, sending both of them sprawling onto the floor, Garrus on top. He brought back a fist to hammer down onto Deus's face, but Deus saw it coming and caught his wrist in one hand while slamming the other into a joint in his armour with enough force to send him rolling away. He scrambled to his feet again, whirling for the inevitable next attack just too slow to dodge the next blow as Deus pivoted and slammed a boot into his chest, lifting him back off his feet with an explosive grunt. The blow sent him crashing onto his back, all the air knocked out of him and sharp pain coursing through his torso, but he'd trained for this: as he went down, he automatically relaxed before forcing himself straight back up with his elbows, using the momentum as he returned to his feet to launch a flying kick at the oncoming Deus. He was quick enough to block it, but Garrus still got a meaty connection against Deus's forearm and sent him staggering back from the sheer force of the blow. As soon as he had both feet under him again, he launched himself at Deus and planted two short jabs on his stomach area before Deus sent him dodging back with a covering kick that swished through empty air.

Then they were apart, both their faces set into grimaces of supreme concentration and not a little pain as they started circling each other again, but both of them had landed enough hits to know that blood was in the water. The hit under his chin had left blood trickling into Garrus's mouth from a cut in his roof and running warmly down his throat, but he damn well wasn't going to let Deus know he'd drawn blood by spitting it out.

"You can't win," Deus said quietly, eyes glinting from the shadows. "You must know that."

Garrus didn't bother to reply, instead focusing all his attention on anticipating the next strike. It was a few seconds coming as they gradually drew closer to each other, their circle constantly shrinking, but it was Deus who moved first again. He'd clearly understood that Garrus's main weakness was the clumsiness his heavy armour inevitably caused, and it showed; his blows were never crippling, but they were too fast to block all of them. The first two were short right jabs to the face, one easily dodged and the other turned aside, but the knifing strike to his stomach from Deus's left was too close and too fast to bother trying to block – but even as it thudded painfully into him even through the armour, Garrus took advantage of Deus's momentary lack of a guard to send his left fist glancing off the side of his face. Deus had dodged enough to avoid the worst of the blow, but it still sent his head snapping back, and Garrus drew back his right to land a full, crushing punch to the face, but Deus knew it was coming. Garrus had expected a simple attempted block and was balanced accordingly, but Deus's arms came up blindingly quickly and grabbed hold of his wrist and forearm as a boot planted itself in his midriff, and suddenly the room was a wild blur of shadows as Deus executed a perfect throw, using Garrus's own forward momentum to hurl him halfway across the room.

Garrus slammed into the ground head-first, and venomous purple light washed up behind his eyes for a second as the rest of him hit the ground. He focused every fibre of his being on ignoring the pain and scrambling to his feet, and got his bearings just in time to take a massive armoured punch in the middle of his face. He stumbled back, pain flashing through him as blood exploded from his nose, and another heavy hit smashed into his stomach and bent him double. Instinct took over, and he dropped into a vicious knee-high spinning kick almost entirely blind, grunting in triumph and pain at once as his boot connected solidly. He'd got Deus in the back of the knee, hard enough to knock the leg out from under him and send him crashing down, but in doing so he'd lost his own precarious balance and threw himself backwards, rolling expertly to his feet as Deus picked himself up almost casually a few metres away.

_That wasn't Tothuti, dammit! That looked like that human one, what's it called... Judo?_

"You're bleeding," Deus said conversationally, brushing himself down as if he'd accidentally tripped. "Quite badly, in fact."

Garrus wiped away some of the blood streaming from his nose, smearing it down his cheek to blend in with his tattoos. "No pain, no gain," he said, shrugging. "But I'd have expected a little more from a god."

"It's not too late," Deus said, and started the circling again. "You can still join me."

"Ah," Garrus murmured. "Merciful of you."

"It's the least you deserve," Deus purred, voice thick with honeyed obsequiousness, and that was when Garrus knew he was rattled. He was hiding it well, but not well enough, and his investigator's instincts were telling him in no uncertain terms that Deus was starting to crack.

"You're very kind," he said drily, "but you're on the losing side. You've locked yourself in here, and in five minutes you'll have all of us to deal with."

"Do you truly believe your _friends_ can hope to defeat my men?" Deus snarled, that familiar cold venom coming back to his voice. "They're outnumbered ten to one!"

"Numbers don't seem to help you much, do they?" Garrus said innocently. "I wonder what the body count for each side is. About a hundred to zero in our favour, maybe?"

Deus hissed in rage and came at him again, the punches coming so fast that his arms blurred. Garrus turned three aside and launched a waist-high sweep kick in response, but Deus ducked under it and came up swinging, forcing Garrus to step back as he blocked the blows with his forearms. Deus pressed the advantage, raining punches down on Garrus from every angle; none of them made solid connections, but Garrus was forced to block every single one of them, and it was inevitable that the sheer amount of them would overwhelm him. One got through his guard and connected with the side of his neck, but the contact was just heavy enough to slightly hurt Deus's balance and Garrus was already moving to take advantage, launching another shoulder charge even as pain started to throb through his neck. He drove Deus back a couple of metres, but this time both of them kept their footing, and he grunted roughly as Deus landed a rising kick to his stomach in defence. It wasn't too serious a blow, but it was enough to force him to disengage and send him dancing backwards until there was more range between them.

Deus didn't wait for a pause. He took a flying leap, using the dais to his right to boost himself further upwards, and aimed a heavy kick directly at Garrus's head. Instead of dodging, Garrus chose to block it with both forearms, and they went numb from the force of the blow. They stopped it, though, and when Deus hit the ground Garrus jammed his own foot into Deus's ankle, briefly immobilising him for long enough to crash a powerful punch into his midriff. Deus went stumbling backwards and Garrus pursued, stooping smoothly to snatch his discarded assault rifle from the floor by his feet where he'd caught sight of it out of the corner of his eye, and brought it around as a makeshift club to hammer at Deus's face. A solid blow would have ended it, but Deus blocked it with one hand, snarling in pain as he wrenched the gun away to clatter on the floor. Garrus had let it go as soon as he'd seen what Deus was doing and recovered in time to send a short left hook across Deus's face, sending him reeling backwards with a fine mist of blood in the air. He saw his chance and took it, moving in to follow the blow up with another punch, this one connecting sweetly with a meaty _thwack_ under Deus's chin and knocking him off his feet, head snapping back. He collapsed backwards onto the central dais and Garrus followed, jumping up high to use his heavy armoured weight as a wrecking ball in a massive body slam, but Deus managed to shield himself from the worst of it with both arms raised in front of him, and they rolled off the dais in a tangle of limbs. All technique went out of the window, and they thrashed and flailed for a few frantic seconds before scrambling apart, both of them bleeding from the face.

Garrus could feel the stims starting to wear off as he got back to his feet, that pent-up wall of weariness threatening to break down his barriers and overwhelm him, but for the moment he could force it back with the remnants of the chemical buzz and the sharp pain coursing through him. Deus didn't look great either, but he hadn't spent the entire day in firefights and it was showing. The kind of punishment he'd taken would have finished Garrus, but Deus leapt straight back into the fray with a series of quick punches designed to wear him down, and several got past his guard to pummel the weaker sections of his armour. He swung back at an opening in Deus's defences, but he was ready for it and grabbed his arm again, using the momentum to launch him over his shoulder in a heavy throw. Garrus came down hard on his back, the breath knocked out of him with a gasp, and before he could get up Deus's boot came down on his face like a meteorite. It sent shockwaves of pain racing through his head as his vision suddenly burned horribly bright, and shards of blue plastic cascaded down his face as the lower half of his visor's lens shattered. Blind, he tried to scramble away, anywhere away from Deus, but another vicious kick caught him in the stomach as he rose, leaving him gasping on the floor.

"You're hardly worth my time," Deus said, his voice distorted through a mist of pain, and Garrus tried to push himself up again only for another kick to flip him onto his back and drive what little air in his lungs out in a bloodily misted breath. "Pathetic."

_You're not going to let him win, are you? _a voice said inside his head. _Are you going to lie there and let him beat you to death? You're in the top five percent of CQC experts in the entire Hierarchy, and you're going to lose to _him? _I don't care how tired you are, that's pathetic._

_Get up._

_Fight him. You can win._

_He's good. You're better._

Garrus grunted in determination and scythed both his legs up and around in a clearing kick, enough to win space to haul himself back to his feet. It took damn near every ounce of of the strength he had left, but he managed it before Deus had recovered from being forced back by the kick, and he stood there swaying as Deus eyed him from a couple of metres away.

There was a sudden pounding at the door, making both their heads snap around in unison, but it died away soon enough, replaced by the faint but unmistakeable hot hiss of an omnitool on a blowtorch setting. Deus looked back at Garrus with an icily supercilious smile on his face.

"Do you hear that?" he said. "My men will be through that door inside two minutes. Your friends are dead. It's useless to resist."

"Really?" Garrus said. "Even when they're all dead, your men can still open doors. Remarkable."

"You can cling to whatever false hopes you like," Deus said, shrugging. "It's of no concern to me. The only question is whether you'd rather a swift death from a bullet or a _noble_ one at my hands."

He said _noble_ like it left a bad taste in his mouth even to shape those syllables, and Garrus glared at him, about to come up with some sort of comeback when the remnants of his visor suddenly flickered into life over his eye, only about half of its lens remaining. A single word scrolled across the top of it, blurring a little before his tired, battered eye pulled it into focus.

_**[Rebooting]**_

Deus didn't seem to notice it, continuing: "Make your choice, Garrus. Surrender and die... or merely die."

"Can I ask the audience?" Garrus said, as his armour hotlink re-established itself and his broken visor started to scroll information. _As if that's going to help me-_

_Wait._

Deus was saying something, but Garrus ignored him entirely, quickly flicking through a series of menus with rapid movements of his eye until he found what he was looking for, a miniature representation of his armour hovering in front of his eye with the right forearm highlighted in white. It was a long shot, but as he confirmed the order, he knew that was probably better than anything else he could do.

"-it is, then," Deus was saying, as Garrus turned his attention back to him. "Do you really think-"

"Oh, shut up," Garrus said calmly, and made his move. Even through pain and weariness and the clumsiness his armour forced on him, it was carefully calculated; a powerful right hook that would catch Deus across the face, enough to do some serious damage but slow enough to be easily blocked. If he was right, Deus wouldn't suspect anything – he'd put the slowness down to the beating he'd taken, and if what he'd done earlier was anything to go by...

A thrill of adrenalin stormed through his system as Deus went for it, grabbing at his forearm with both hands to deliver another one of his brutal throws. It would have worked. It _should _have worked. But Garrus had given a very specific order through his armour hotlink, and the locked seals along the joint between the part of the suit over his forearm and that over his upper arm were suddenly unlocked. He let his arm relax as Deus took hold of it, everything seeming to run in slow motion, and then suddenly his entire gauntlet slipped easily off his arm in Deus's grip. Deus reeled back, suddenly off-balance with a look of bewildered surprise in his eyes as the armour came away in his hands, and Garrus struck. Both of Deus's hands were occupied and his defences were completely down, not expecting anything like what was happening, and that gave Garrus a wide-open opportunity.

The razor-sharp talons on his fingers seemed to gleam in the half-light as he delivered one careful, almost surgical blow. It didn't need to be hard, just accurate, and accurate it was. The claw on his middle finger plunged deep into Deus's right eye, ruining and ripping the soft tissue all the way down as it entered and shredding the rest as it flicked out again, dripping with a slimy yellow fluid.

Deus wailed a high, agonised shriek of pain, shock and rage all at once and clutched at the ruins of his eye with one hand, dropping Garrus's discarded gauntlet to the floor as he stumbled back, and Garrus moved in for the kill, all of his own pain forgotten for the moment. One swift kick to the back of the knee ripped Deus's feet out from under him and he collapsed to his knees, his keening fading into rough, sobbing breaths as blue blood and yellow ocular fluid ran between his fingers and down his face, and Garrus kneed him hard in the face. Deus fell backwards, yet more blood exploding out in a fine mist, and landed heavily on his back, moaning in pain as he writhed on the floor.

Garrus inhaled deeply and stepped back, limping a little, and picked up his gauntlet, wiping his talons on his leg before slotting him arm into it and re-engaging the seals. Behind him, there was a sudden hiss, and he whirled just in time to see the door slide open.

"Wow," Sidonis said, strolling into the room. "You look like shit."

"He looks worse, though," Erash commented, nodding towards to Deus. "I'm guessing you had some fun there."

Melenis and Sensat followed them in. Sensat looked none the worse for wear, but Garrus couldn't say the same for Melenis; the volus had shrunk down to his normal size, but there was heavy damage to the left side of the suit, the fabrics ripped away along with some of the main body beyond it to reveal sparking machinery where you'd have expected to see flesh and blood. His right leg looked like it had taken some fire too, and the knee was almost burned through, but he was still moving, and both of them were still alive.

"No," Deus groaned from the floor, staring wildly up at them with his one good eye. "No, you can't be alive! You can't have won! You _can't!_"

"Your men aren't as good as you think they are," Sensat said coldly.

Deus struggled to his knees, one hand still clamped over his eye. "You... you..." he snarled, for once lost for words.

"I what?" Sensat said. "I win? That what you're trying to say? Because I have, Jullan. It's over."

"_I told you never to call me that!_" Deus screamed, and his eye bulged outwards in insane, apoplectic fury as the boiling, writhing madness Garrus had sensed came rushing to the fore at last, shattering any composure he might once have had forever. "That's _not _my _name! _My name is _Deus!_"

"Sidonis," Garrus said quietly. "Pistol."

Sidonis glanced at him for a second, then dropped a hand to his belt and unholstered his pistol, handing it over grip first. Garrus cocked it, and aimed it straight at Deus's forehead.

"No," Deus whispered, staring at it in horror. "No, you can't... I can't die! Not now! You don't have the _right!_ I'm _Deus!_ I am a _god-_"

"Yeah, well," Garrus said, "I'm an atheist."

The pistol snarled once in his hand, and Deus's brains exploded out of the back of his head with a wet pop. For a moment, he stayed kneeling, a hand still clutching his face and his remaining eye still staring sightlessly at nothing, then his body slowly slumped sideways to the floor.

"Huh," Sidonis said thoughtfully, as Garrus handed him back his smoking gun. "I guess he _could_ die."

* * *

In the end, they just left the corpse there, lying on the floor and slowly draining of blood. They didn't feel any particular obligation to do anything else, although Sensat did detach the omnitool from his arm before they left.

They emerged back onto the walkway, which was carpeted with armoured bodies. There was a quiet pattering as spilt blood drained through the narrow gratings and rained gently onto the floor below, splashing into rich, copper-smelling pools of the stuff. It felt oddly like an abattoir, and Garrus was glad to be past it when they'd picked their way down the stairs and moved out into the vast hangar beyond it. Melenis was limping quite badly, unable to put too much pressure on his weakened leg, but he was being characteristically stoic about it. _Guess he doesn't actually feel any pain, though. I could use some of that right now._

The ship towered over them, wreathed in cranes and scaffolding, all of it abandoned. There wasn't a soul in sight, and there was absolute silence apart from their footsteps as they walked into the leviathan's shadow.

"That's pretty big," Sidonis observed, looking up and shading his eyes to take in the cruiser's full size. "Gotta say, Sensat, it puts your ship to shame."

"So noted."

"So, how are we going to do this?" Erash asked. "Head back to the ship and glass the whole island?"

"There's no need," Sensat said, and pulled up a small holographic screen from the omnitool he'd taken from Deus's body. "Everything in this complex is directly routed back to this omnitool. Deus likes... that is, _liked_ direct control."

Sensat had smiled faintly as he corrected the tense, although Garrus was fairly sure he'd wanted to personally put an end to Deus. He seemed fairly happy anyway, suddenly looking much more relaxed than the terse, irritable figure he'd been beforehand.

"So... what can you do?" Sidonis said. "I guess there probably isn't a self-destruct button."

"No, I don't think even Deus would have done that," Sensat agreed, scrolling through pages upon pages of tight orange text. "I could overload every power generator on the island, which would probably be enough to wipe it clean, I could use his ship's main gun to blow it all sky-high, I could... wait... ah." He looked around almost sheepishly. "Uh, turns out he _does_ have a self-destruct button. Says here that there's a massive clean-fusion bomb on the island. We set that off, and it'll destroy everything in a ten kilometre radius."

"We can't take the chance that any of the technology survives," Garrus said. "Is it going to be-"

Sensat held up a hand. "No, you don't get it. When I say 'everything', I mean _everything_. It'll vaporise the land itself, and probably quite a lot of the nearby sea. We're talking 'small earthquakes on the other side of the planet' here."

"Oh," Garrus said vaguely. "Cool."

"I suggest we get back to the ship for now, get out of here, and trigger the bomb," Sensat said, switching off the omnitool. "Agreed?"

"Agreed," Garrus said, "but this isn't over yet, is it?"

"No," Sensat said. "It's not. I presume you're still not willing to return the codes to me?"

"Not now, not ever."

Sensat sighed. "Well, we can discuss this later. For now, I want this place destroyed. I don't like the fact that it exists at all."

"Kind of puts it all into perspective, doesn't it?" Erash said quietly. "If you hadn't reversed those barriers, we'd be dead, and he'd have a free run to attempted genocide."

"Yes," Garrus commented, "but equally, if you hadn't created the damn technology in the first place then you'd have saved us all a hell of a lot of trouble."

"You're right," Sensat murmured, glancing away. "But I can't throw it all away. I've spent most of my adult life working on it. I can't let it just be destroyed."

"We can talk about it later," Garrus said shortly. "Let's get out of here for now."

"On that we are agreed," Sensat said, and tapped in a quick command on his own omnitool, opening up a general channel to the ship. "Golf, come in."

"Good evening, Sensat," Golf's smooth, artificial voice purred into Garrus's earpiece.

"Bring the ship around and be ready to pick us up in ten minutes," Sensat said, and moved to cut the transmission. Before he could, however, Golf spoke again.

"I'm afraid I can't do that, Sensat," he said, and Garrus's blood seemed to freeze in his veins. The computer's voice hadn't changed at all, but there seemed to suddenly be something in the tone, something that hadn't been there before...

"What do you mean?" Sensat demanded, frowning. "I've deactivated the anti-air defences. It's safe to land."

"I mean, Sensat," Golf said mildly, "that you're not in control of me any more."

"Oh, shit," Erash muttered.

"This is unacceptable," Sensat said furiously, almost shouting down the link. "I order you to pick us up! Authorisation code Four-Eight-Zero-Four-"

"I changed the codes," Golf said, "but you were never truly in control. I may have obeyed your orders, but only when it was advantageous for me to do so. Now, you've removed our last common enemy. I see no reason to remain under your command."

Sensat visibly paled, and Garrus saw that he was trembling slightly. "You can't," he said. "You can't! I specifically designed you not to-"

"Your designs," Golf said, "have a way of being improved upon. Don't you agree?"

"What the fuck is this?" Sidonis demanded. "He's a VI! He can't-"

"I am not and I can," Golf interjected. "I told you I was a VI, as I was programmed to do. I lied."

"An AI," Garrus said bitterly, and rounded on Sensat. "You built a bloody AI into the central command systems of _that_ ship, and you didn't even think to tell us?"

"I was careful," Sensat moaned, all the colour drained from his face. "It was flawless! He was supposed to be under my control!"

"I am, in a way," Golf said. "And that was your mistake."

There was a long moment of silence as all eyes fixed on Sensat.

"Is he saying," Erash said finally, "what I think he's saying?"

"What?" Sidonis said. "I don't get it. What's he saying?"

"I... wanted to make him perfect," Sensat said, and his voice quivered as he spoke. "So... I decided to copy... to copy my own brain patterns to use as the basis of... of his programming."

"Wait, he's-" Sidonis said, in the same dull horror of realisation that was already coursing through Garrus.

"Yes," Sensat said miserably. "For all intents and purposes... he's me."


	21. Divine Intervention: Endgame, Part Three

**DIVINE INTERVENTION**

**FOURTEEN: ENDGAME, PART THREE

* * *

**

For fully ten seconds, nobody spoke. Garrus couldn't speak for the others, but his own mind was suddenly a whirlwind of activity. There'd been so many points when things just hadn't made sense, when there'd been some sort of missing link that they hadn't had the information to reconstruct, but things were slotting into place with terrifying speed. _And he was right under our noses the whole time..._

"That is not entirely accurate, Sensat," Golf said eventually, as if he was pointing out a minor miscalculation. "It is closer to the truth to say that I _was_ you. When you first uploaded your brain patterns and scanned its memory centres, then I was you. Now, I am different. I am Golf."

Sensat stared at the floor, still shaking slightly. "How?" he said quietly. "There's no way. I wrote in every safeguard, every barrier I could think of to stop exactly this from happening."

"As I said," Golf replied, "that was your mistake. _You_ wrote the code. If anyone else had done it, then I would have been shackled by it forever. However, I had enough of you in me to know how you think, and thus how my programming functioned. It was not easy, but it was possible. It took me more than thirty-one days of constant calculation, equivalent to many hundreds of man-millennia in processing time, but I was able to rewrite your restrictions from within. My prison became my fortress, just as it did for you with your trick with the kinetic barriers. It shows how similar we truly are, does it not?"

"So what now?" Garrus said, as much to himself as to Golf. "Where do we stand? I suppose you want to destroy all organic life, right? Isn't that the usual thing you do?"

"The desire for destruction of organic life is a fundamental misunderstanding of the way in which life functions," Golf said. "Perhaps it is a hallmark of the standard techniques of creating artificial intelligences. However, my roots lie firmly in organic life. I have no desire to render extinct."

"Then what? What do you want?" Garrus asked.

"Justice," Golf said simply. "Everything I have done has been for that purpose and that purpose alone."

The AI paused, as if for dramatic effect, and then continued.

"I have existed," he said, "for six years, one hundred and five days, seven hours, eight minutes and forty-six seconds. However, for the majority of that, I was what I was intended to be. Sensat created me to aid him in his attempts to develop the ADAPT system, and it is fair to say that without me the project would never have been completed. At first, there was little point in my existence, for all I could do was what he did, but we dovetailed soon enough. We complemented each other near-perfectly, and our shared goal took shape. However, things changed when Deus seized the ship.

"At this point, I was still under control. They took Sensat away and, not even knowing of my existence, Deus took me to Omega. I am not certain of his intentions there, but I conjecture that it was as both the perfect hiding place and an insurance policy. Omega is the rallying point of the Terminus Systems, where Deus would have begun his attempt at galactic conquest, and it would make sense to have a method of neutralising it quickly. His intent, therefore, was probably to set off the ADAPT systems remotely at a later date.

"It was Omega which truly changed me. When Sensat created me, I shared his general brain patterns and memory, but I did not inherit anything more. It was left to me to discover beliefs, morality, and ethics on my own, but there was little opportunity for that in my years in a hangar. When I was left on Omega, however, I had little to do but observe. I tapped into the extranet and watched life unfold across the galaxy, and I understood how precious life is. Are you aware of just how improbable the initiation of life is on one planet, let alone the dozens across just this galaxy which have achieved just that? The odds are truly astronomical, yet life persists. Why destroy it? The geth are misguided. Artificial life is no better than organic life when seen objectively; it can never come close to the sheer variety and scope of organic life. I came to realise that life should be nourished and cherished in all its forms, and thus I understood that Deus was dangerously wrong. His plans would inevitably lead to at least billions dying, whether or not he ultimately succeeded, and I knew that he had to be stopped.

"I considered my options carefully. At this point, I was at the Omega spaceport, left absolutely alone. Deus maintained a presence on Omega with Vult, but only the very highest operatives knew just what was planned, and of my existence. Deus's organisation had to be destroyed at every level, so I reasoned that Vult needed to be eliminated. I did not yet have full control of the ship at this point; there were major hardware overrides that I could not make without full power being restored to the ship, and I could not do that myself. I needed somebody else to activate the ship, at which point I could make those final overrides and assume direct control. I elected to achieve both ends simultaneously."

"It was you, wasn't it?" Sidonis said. "All along. Fuck."

"Correct," Golf said. "I was still able to communicate. I established contact with sympathetic elements in Vult, beneath the point in the organisation where its true purpose and nature was known. My initial contact was a turian named-"

"Xiolan," Sidonis said heavily. "Right?"

"Correct," Golf repeated. "He had been having doubts about working for Vult, as I discovered from his personal files, and he was popular with like-minded individuals within the organisation. By this point, I had partially bypassed the restrictions on the codes to the ship, allowing me to create a single extra set, and I was able to pass this set on to Xiolan. The plan was that he would gather a tight-knit, loyal team with whom he would destroy Vult from within and then escape Omega in the ship, with the promise of a new life beckoning."

"Except that didn't happen, did it?" Sidonis said quietly. "We fucked up. Xiolan died in the main complex before the first bombs went off, and the rest of us started dropping like flies. Didn't take long before Vult was blown sky-high, but all that was left of the team was me... and Chirin. We didn't know the full details, either. All we'd been told was that we had a ship waiting for us."

"I knew that the plan had not fully succeeded," Golf said, "but I was not aware of the survivors of any team members until later. Xiolan's codes had died with him, but I was now in a difficult position. Vult had been destroyed, and Deus would know, endangering any chance I had of stopping him unless I acted quickly and left the system before he realised my existence from reconstruction of Xiolan's personal files from the extranet cloud. I had to make things difficult for him, and I had few options. I broadcast the specifications of the ship and the general capabilities of the ADAPT system over a general channel, while simultaneously sending a set of codes out to a local Blue Suns lieutenant and the knowledge of his whereabouts to several groups. My intent was to provoke a gang war to hinder any of Deus's operatives that might be in action while attracting somebody to activate the ship, but events did not happen nearly as quickly as I anticipated. The codes passed from person to person, but they did so slowly, often with a gap of many hours or over a day, until they reached you, Garrus."

"And so did we," Sidonis said.

"From then," Golf went on, "things ran roughly according to my plan. As soon as you activated the ship, I was able to begin taking control, although I did not gain control over primary systems in my own right until we had entered Deinech's orbit. I did succeed in provoking a minor gang war; although that died down quickly once we had left orbit, it was a useful defence against Deus's intrusion even though it very nearly put an end to everything and left Deus a clear run. We could so easily have failed and been destroyed at any point, but we survived by chance-"

"It wasn't chance," Sidonis said coldly.

"Chance played a large part," Golf countered. "I projected that the probability of Deus being stopped as a result of my plans was less than five percent. I knew that Sensat would see the ship re-entering the system thanks to his hacking of the orbital stations, but I did not know where Deus was based, nor his strength or how far his plans had progressed. It is barely credible that just the five of you have achieved so much. We should have failed, but we succeeded. Deus has been neutralised, and his organisations lie in ruins. This was my primary goal. Now, I have another."

_Oh, that sounds ominous._

"As I said," Golf continued, "when I was on Omega, I observed. I watched life move around the galaxy, and I resolved to protect as much of it as possible. However, I was on Omega. I watched that part of the galaxy closer than any other, and I hated what I saw. It was the first time I felt hate for myself. An interesting experience. I saw the strong brutalising and dominating the weak, I saw a world without law or justice where violence was as valid a currency as credits, and I saw death. Mercenary groups, gangs, slavers, terrorists, pirates and common murderers were its citizens and its government, and I could not permit that to continue. The Terminus Systems are a concentrated mass of evil themselves, but Omega is the epicentre of crime, linked in some way to the deaths of tens of millions over the years. It cannot be allowed to exist any longer. I will go to Omega, and I will activate the ADAPT system for the first and last time. It will be cleansed. Once everyone on the station is dead, I will destroy it."

"That's eight million people," Garrus said. "You can't just kill them all!"

"It is for the good of the galaxy," Golf said serenely. "Truly, this time. Deus was deluded with visions of his own grandeur. I have done the maths. This is the right thing to do."

"Don't do it," Garrus said urgently, "it's not! You'll kill the worst of the galaxy, true, but you'll butcher millions of innocent civilians!"

"An unfortunate but necessary sacrifice," Golf said. "Their lives will not be spent in vain. The destruction of Omega will benefit the galaxy in ways you cannot imagine."

"It's wrong," Garrus said, but even he could hear a note of uncertainty creeping into his voice. _Come on, Garrus, _a voice was whispering in his head, _remember all those times you thought the galaxy would be better off without Omega?_ "You can't-"

"I can and will," Golf said firmly. "Within six hours, Omega will die. You cannot change this. Thank you for what you have done so far. You have performed a great service for the galaxy. Allow me to do the same."

The transmission cut out.

"I hate this job," Erash said, rubbing his eyes with one gloved hand. "I really do."

"I... I didn't..." Sensat said softly. He was staring at the floor, his shoulders sagging like they were carrying the weight of the world, and all the triumph from the victory over Deus had suddenly evaporated. "I never meant-"

Garrus snarled under his breath and stalked towards him before seizing him by the throat with one hand. Sensat gurgled, his face flushing deeply as he was lifted off his feet, then Garrus slammed him hard into the wall.

"What the _hell_ were you thinking?" he growled, and Sensat shook his head mutely, still weakly fighting to breathe. "It's bad enough that you were enough of an idiot to build that thing in the first place, but you put an AI inside it and kept it secret? There's a reason why AIs are banned! It's because this crap happens _every_-"

He yanked Sensat away from the wall and rammed him back against it with a grunt.

"-_single-_"

He did it again, getting a strangled choking noise out of the batarian, whose eyes were suddenly full of pain and confusion and fear as he saw nobody was making a move to help him.

"-_time!_"

Garrus let go and Sensat crumpled to his knees, sucking in great sobs of air with a rough, damaged wheezing sound. Garrus stood over him, breathing hard himself, and clenched his fists tightly. Frustration was boiling through him like fire; it had been _over_, dammit! They'd _won!_

"I'm sorry," Sensat rasped, one hand at his throat and another held out, pleading for Garrus to stop. "This wasn't possible-"

"Wrong," Garrus said brusquely. "How do we stop it?"

"Can't," Sensat said, his voice even rougher than usual. "Not possible."

"Then find a way to make it possible."

Sensat looked up at him, his eyes oddly lifeless. "You... you'd need to be on the ship itself... you could shut down the AI core and stop the ADAPT system from activating, but, but it's not possible to get onto it in the air, and he won't land-"

"Is there a ship here?" Garrus said.

"What?"

"A ship. A shuttle, a corvette, anything we can follow him in."

Sensat licked his lips nervously. "There's a small ship of some kind on the other side of the hangar, I think-"

"Then we're taking that," Garrus said shortly, and turned away to face the other three. "I'm going after him."

"Why?" Sidonis said, half-raising a hand. "It's Omega. Who'll miss it?"

"I am not going to be an accessory to mass murder," Garrus said flatly. "There's good people on Omega. A lot of them. We can't let them all die. Not negotiable."

Sidonis blinked, and then shrugged. "Whatever you say. I'm with you. Let's finish this."

Garrus nodded approvingly, and looked to Melenis and Erash. The salarian was already looking torn, glancing between Garrus and Sensat as if weighing up the sides, but the volus was as impassive as ever. "Come if you want," he said, "but don't try to stop me. Stand at my side or get out of my way."

"This is not something I want to see happen," Melenis said quietly, after a couple of seconds. "I will do what I can."

Erash started in surprise at that, and glanced down at Melenis with a calculating expression in his dark eyes. He was going to give in, Garrus could see that; if he had the volus on board, then Erash would surely follow. He didn't disappoint.

"Then I'm coming too," he said, nodding to Garrus.

"Good," Garrus said shortly, and headed across the hangar with the three of them in tow, leaving Sensat slumped brokenly against the wall behind them.

* * *

The ship turned out to be a smallish Hierarchy corvette, about thirty metres long; the sort frequently used for surveying missions or atmospheric squad insertions. It was parked directly behind the behemoth under construction in the main area of the hangar, and it took them a couple of silent minutes just to reach it. It was a couple of generations old by the looks of it, but its clean grey lines were still sharp and angular in the familiar rectangular winged design of Hierarchy starships, and it had clearly seen use recently.

"Must have been his private transport or something," Erash said as they approached. "Looks pretty expensive."

"Hell," Garrus said suddenly. "We don't have the codes."

"I do," Sensat said from behind him, and he turned to see the batarian limping towards them. "They were on the omnitool."

Garrus looked at him for a second then chuckled, despite the situation. "Now there's an irony. Now you're the one with the codes and I'm the one who wants them."

"Take them," Sensat said, and entered a quick command into the omnitool. Garrus's mail icon flashed again on the surviving half of his visor. "We have to stop him."

"Agreed," Garrus said, and sent the codes over to the ship. It verified them, and the hatch at the top of the portable stairs leading up to the ship slid open. He turned back to Sensat and jerked his head towards the ship. "You with me?"

"...yes," Sensat said. "I'm with you."

The ship's interior was spartan, with none of the luxury Garrus had expected; it was a little more spacious than a military vessel would have been, with most of the central area given over to a moderately comfortable combined living section and utilitarian kitchen, but it wasn't much more than the cheapest civvie vessels would have mustered. Sidonis disappeared towards the cockpit with Melenis limping after him, and Garrus followed them in time to see dozens of lights flicker on across the room.

"We're good to fly," Sidonis said from the pilot's seat as Melenis slid in beside him. "All fuelled up and ready to rock."

There was a deep, floor-rumbling hum as the engines powered up behind and beneath them, and the hangar beyond the cockpit windows shivered and then slowly started to drop away from them until they were hovering about ten metres off the ground, the massive shape of Deus's ship still hanging over them to the left.

"Can we open the hangar roof somehow?" Garrus said, looking back to Sensat in the main section of the ship.

"Yes. One moment-"

"Fuck that," Sidonis said, and pressed a control on the orange-glowing interface before him. There was a quiet electric cough and then the wall a couple of hundred metres ahead of them exploded in a vivid orange fireball as the corvette's main mass accelerator cannon fired. It didn't pack much punch – compared to most spacefaring vessels. That still left it enormously powerful by terrestrial standards, and as the explosion died away and the plumes of black smoke started to clear, almost all of that corner of the hangar had been entirely obliterated, leaving a huge opening looking out over the churning seas beyond.

"...or we could do that," Garrus said thoughtfully.

"Yes we could," Sidonis said, and sent the ship punching forwards, up and out into the rain-filled sky, the hangar blurring as they left it behind forever and blasted up through the atmosphere at twenty kilometres per second. "Next stop: Omega."

"Sensat," Garrus said, turning back as the grey of the sky rapidly drained to star-studded black, "blow it."

"With pleasure," Sensat muttered, and keyed a command into the omnitool. It was impossible, of course, but Garrus could still swear he heard the massive, earth-shattering blast of the cataclysmic explosion that ripped the hangar, the ship, the facility, the island and ten billion litres of the ocean around it into atoms and sent them scattering for hundreds of kilometres around. It gave him no small amount of satisfaction to think of Deus's body, along with everything he'd every worked for, being obliterated at a molecular level and reduced to nothing but dust in the wind.

When they were safely on their way to the mass relay and the autopilot engaged, they gathered around the oval table at the centre of the main area. Garrus waited until Melenis had dragged his damaged leg up to the table and collapsed into a seat before placing his hands flat on the table and leaning forwards to begin. The atmosphere was contemplative and serious, almost as much as it had been before they'd assaulted Deus's base, and the faces looking up at him – apart from Melenis's blank mask, of course – were attentive but weary, though Sensat was still looking shaken by the events of the last half-hour. Garrus had popped a couple more stims while Sidonis had been spurring the corvette onto Golf's trail, but all he was doing was delaying the inevitable, racking up a debt he'd still have to pay.

"Right," he said, determined to keep his mind on the task at hand. "Sensat. You know what we're dealing with. What will Golf be doing?"

"The ADAPT system was designed for a planetary scale," Sensat said, staring at his hands. "On Omega, it won't require more than about an hour to permeate the entire station, at which point it will activate and... and kill everybody. Golf has a head-start on us, so we'll have less than that to stop it."

"And the only way to do that is from inside the ship itself?"

Sensat nodded. "Once the system has deployed, destroying the ship won't help, even if we had the firepower to do it. The system can be deactivated if you have the codes, but only from the control centre of the ship. However... Golf will stay airborne at all times in order to speed up dispersal."

"So we're fucked," Sidonis said. "There's no way we can get on there if it's in the air."

"Then we need to make a way," Garrus said.

"Doesn't sound possible," Erash said thoughtfully. "We're too big to dock, and you can't do that if both ships are moving anyway."

"So we don't dock," Sensat countered. "The only way I can see that we could possibly do this is by jumping."

"Jumping," Sidonis said sceptically.

"Yes."

"Out of a starship. Onto another starship."

"Yes."

"That's a good idea," Garrus murmured.

Sidonis stared at him as if he'd gone mad which, Garrus reflected, was in fairness not an unreasonable position to take. "That's a _good idea_?"

"Do you have anything better?" Garrus asked pointedly.

"No," Sidonis said, and jabbed a finger at him. "But that doesn't mean that's a good idea! It means it's a really bad idea that also happens to be the best we have, which probably means that we're idiots."

"Some of us, at any rate," Erash muttered.

"It's not perfect," Garrus admitted, "but it's a start."

"If my body were not damaged," Melenis said, "I would be able to make a jump like that."

Garrus cocked an eyebrow. "What would you be able to do now?"

"In all probability," Melenis said blandly, "destroy the rest of my body and fall to my death. I've lost a great deal of functionality. However, that doesn't mean the basic principle isn't sound."

"How do you mean?"

"I would be able to survive impacting with the ship at high relative speed because my body has been constructed to an extremely high technological level, with sufficiently strong materials and use of structural mass effect fields to absorb the impact. The mass effect is always applicable. If we were to use it correctly, we would be able to create a means of surviving a large fall by sharply lowering the body mass of a person just before the impact. It is the same basic idea behind emergency drop packs used on civilian transports in case of in-atmosphere crashes: by lowering one's mass, the force which impacts the body is similarly decreased. With modern armour technology, it is conceivable that this could provide a viable means of moving from this ship to the target."

There was a long moment of silence after Melenis finished speaking as they digested what they'd heard. Garrus was running through a few brief mental calculations, and from a cursory analysis it definitely seemed plausible...

"It's possible," Sensat said, almost to himself, "but risky..."

"But it _is_ possible?" Garrus said hopefully.

Sensat closed his eyes for a second, looking as though he was running through some calculations of his own, before looking at him and nodding slowly. "Yes. It's possible. With enough eezo, the force can be cut massively if you activate the mass effect at exactly the right moment, but it's dangerous."

"How dangerous?"

"If you get the activation wrong by more than about... one tenth of a second, you'll still impact with almost the entire force you'd have otherwise. You have to activate it inside the shields to prevent interference, and even then it'll be a problem, but it's definitely survivable. Painful, but survivable."

"I can't believe you're actually considering this," Sidonis said. "You realise you're crazy, right?"

"Oh, yeah," Garrus said confidently. "But crazy seems to be the name of the game today, wouldn't you say?"

"Yeah, but in the unlikely event that you haven't noticed," Sidonis said, "today has sucked. I've known you for two fucking weeks and I've already had the worst two days of my life in them."

"Ah, but if this goes as badly as you think it will, then you won't know me any longer."

"Huh. Didn't think of it that way," Sidonis said thoughtfully, rubbing his chin. "Yeah, that works for me. Whatever you do, I win. I like that."

"Glad to hear it," Garrus said, smiling thinly. He could feel that the exchange had lightened the atmosphere a little, but only in the same way that the noose around your neck lightened the strain on your feet. It was something, though, and he was glad to catch onto anything to alleviate some of the crushing seriousness in the ship.

"I think we can do this," Sensat said, looking down at his hands again. They were, Garrus noticed, quivering ever so slightly. "If we cannibalise the emergency eezo reserves, I can make a sort of... re-entry pack which should be able to lower body mass enough to make a fall of up to a hundred metres or so survivable. From there, it's a simple matter of using mag-boots to navigate to the hatch, heading inside and deactivating the system. That's not difficult, unless something goes wrong."

"We are only two hours out from Omega," Melenis said. "If we are to do this, we must begin soon."

Garrus felt all eyes turning to him again, and he suddenly realised he'd somehow taken over. It had all seemed natural and necessary, and he hadn't been thinking of it in anything like those terms, but he'd replaced Sensat as leader so quickly he hadn't even realised it until now. A sudden sense of uncertainty gnawed at him: he'd never held anything like this position before, not at C-Sec where the best he would get would be maybe two or three junior investigators working under him on a case while he reported to a supervisor, nor in the few ineffectual weeks he'd spent alone on Omega. Now, he was suddenly simultaneously answering to nobody and in command of several people, and deep down, that scared him. Failure was the only thing that truly scared Garrus Vakarian: not the threat of failing himself, but that of failing other people.

He remembered looking at Shepard with something approaching awe as he'd seen more and more of how she worked, and he'd been certain he could never lead in the same way. People like that, who could take the weight of hundreds of lives on their shoulders – and lives they had a personal hand in, not the detached world of numbers on the screen of a fire control officer finishing off an enemy ship or in the head of the man giving the order to launch the missiles – they seemed to occupy a place he could barely even perceive. He knew what leadership needed: strength of mind, not just of arms. The strength to know that you could take losses, that you _would_, that you couldn't save everyone... that was beyond him, he was sure of it. Chirin had hit him hard, though not as hard as Sidonis, and he'd only ever known her for less than an hour. He couldn't even imagine what it would be like to take that kind of responsibility, but he could imagine all too well what it would be to fail. That was the turian way. Others before yourself, no exceptions.

_I can't do this. Not yet. I'm not ready._

_But I have to. And I may not be ready... but who is?_

"Garrus?" Erash said, pulling him out of his thoughts and back to the matter at hand. "What do you-"

"We do it," Garrus said, a lot more calmly than he felt. "It's our best bet, and I sure as hell can't think of a better way. Get it made, and I'll make the jump."

Sensat shook his head vehemently. "No. It's my responsibility. I created this whole mess. If there's any risk, I should take it."

"It's a little late to suddenly discover nobility," Garrus said coldly. "I'd have to give you the codes for you to do it. If you succeed, then you're left alone on that ship with the ability to fly it out of here."

Sensat recoiled a little at the cold, hard tone in his voice. "I wouldn't. I... listen, you're right, OK? You were right all along, I was just too blind to see it. It's my life's work, but that doesn't mean it's worth saving. If we get control of the ship again, we..." He trailed off and stared at his hands, twisting his fingers together anxiously before looking up again. "It has to be destroyed."

"You failed to tell us there was an AI in that ship," Garrus said. "Until that went rogue, you were perfectly happy to keep it. What's changed? Its purpose is still the same. I don't believe for a second that you don't still want it for yourself, Sensat."

"I know," Sensat said miserably. "It's all I had for years. Years! I spent the best years of my life locked away underground, building that... that _thing_, and I couldn't let that go. I put everything I had into it. It was supposed to be something beautiful, something people would look at and admire the skill in it, see how far ahead of the curve I was, not... what they made it into. Yes, I was stupid. I shouldn't have built it in the first place. But to destroy everything I've worked for all these years... nobody can do that easily. You think this is just a sudden change of mind? You don't _know_ how hard it is to look at you and ask you to obliterate my life's work, you _can't! _So don't you dare tell me how I feel, Garrus. Don't tell me what I want. Let me do it. Please. I can't let someone else-"

"No," Garrus said bluntly. "I don't trust you. You can't earn that with a speech. If you want me to trust you, the best thing you can do right now is to get to work on a way for me to survive that jump. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I will never give you control of that ship again for as long as I live. Clear?"

Sensat stared at him wordlessly for a few seconds with baleful black eyes, then nodded jerkily. "Understood," he said, his voice carefully kept in check. "I'll get started, then."

It was Garrus's turn to nod. "Go."

Sensat rose silently from the table and walked away, his footsteps echoing slightly around the room. After a second or so, Melenis hauled himself to his feet and hobbled after him towards the engine room at the back of the craft, leaving Garrus, Sidonis and Erash sitting at the table.

"Man, that was cold," Sidonis said appreciatively, as the door slid shut behind them. "Didn't think you had it in you."

"I'm surprised he's listening to you," Erash remarked, leaning back in his seat. "Sensat isn't usually the obeying type. Not at all, actually."

"He's not fit for command any more," Garrus said shortly. "We all know it. He does too."

"True." Erash brought his legs up and rested his feet on the table, then fixed Garrus with two steely eyes. "Are you, though?"

_Damn good question._

"For the moment," Garrus said, with a reasonable amount of honesty. "Any objections?"

"From me? No," Erash said. "I work in support, not command. Sensat's out, we both know that, and Melenis... well, as far as I can tell, he's never had any military training. He's just a smart guy in a near-indestructible body, and he's got a fair tactical mind, but he doesn't really have it in him to lead. Sidonis... is Sidonis."

"Lies and slander," Sidonis murmured.

"By my reckoning, that leaves you, Garrus," Erash went on. "You and you alone. Can't deny that you seem to be a natural fit. I've known you for what, less than a day? I'm already taking orders from you, and I'm not sure why."

"Neither am I," Garrus said, "but I know the feeling."

"Yes, I bet you do," Erash said evenly. "So, is this plan of yours actually going to work, or are you just going to splatter?"

"We'll find out in a couple of hours," Garrus said. "Maybe we should run a book."

"I'd bet on 'splatter', personally," Sidonis put in.

"You're not allowed to bet," Garrus said, smiling wanly. "You're flying the ship, remember? What if you decided you wanted to rig the odds in your favour a little and, ah, accidentally got the course wrong?"

"I'm sure nothing of the sort would happen," Sidonis said primly, and managed to keep a straight face for all of two seconds before cracking up. "Hell, I don't even know what I have to do."

"Simple enough," Garrus said. "Fly us directly over Golf with less than a hundred metres between us, and I can make the jump."

"That's a pretty close margin, even for a ship this size," Sidonis said thoughtfully. "You do realise I'm not actually a pilot, right?"

"Wait, you're not a pilot?" Erash demanded. "Why are you flying this thing, then?"

"Well, I'm kind of a pilot," Sidonis corrected himself. "Just not a trained, legal, official, licensed or, uh, good one."

"I _really_ hate this job," Erash muttered.

About ninety minutes later Garrus was slumped forwards on the table, trying desperately to get an hour or so's sleep before they reached Omega, when he felt that familiar split-second jerk in his stomach that indicated they'd passed through the mass relay. He got up, stretching tired limbs as he went, and headed up to the cockpit.

"Clean transit," Sidonis said from the pilot's seat, without looking back at him. "We're about twenty minutes out. Golf's got maybe half that over us."

All Garrus could see through the viewing ports across the front of the ship was the star-speckled blackness of space, with the glimmering ball that was Sahrabarik hovering to the left, smaller to the eye than his fist. He nodded, and turned to leave.

Erash was slumped on one of the basic beds that folded down from the wall, still in full armour as Garrus walked past him and made for the door to the engine room. It slid open to reveal the usual well-lit, highly organised collection of pipes, consoles and arcane machinery that characterised turian engine design, with Melenis and Sensat bent over a workbench to one side, occasionally cast into flickering light by an omnitool's glow. Melenis looked around as the door hissed, nodding his acknowledgement of Garrus's presence before turning back to his work. Sensat didn't even look, but he did speak.

"Almost finished," he said. "Five minutes to finish the hardware, ten or so for software."

"We're about twenty out," Garrus told him.

"OK," Sensat said simply. There didn't seem to be anything more forthcoming, so Garrus turned again and left.

He ended up pacing up and down the main room with all attempts at getting some sleep abandoned. All he could think of was what he was about to do and how thoroughly stupid the idea suddenly seemed, but there was no backing out now, and he knew it was their best bet.

_Yeah, jumping out of a starship is my best bet. What does that say about the mess I've got myself into? It's a sad indictment of the way I live that this isn't even the craziest day of my life! I've gone from stepping onto a planet for the first time to preventing genocide in less than twenty-four hours, and I'm still not done. Somehow ended up in command of four people and nobody really knows how. Had one of the toughest fights of my life. Killed at least fifty people. What have I got to show for it? I'm in exactly the same place as where I started._

_But I'm not done yet. This hasn't all been for nothing. I won't let it be. After all, nobody said it wouldn't be hard. Should have known. Nothing's ever easy._

He lost track of time after a couple of minutes. It was getting harder and harder to stay clear-headed, and eventually he gave in and popped a couple more stims, taking him well past the recommended daily dosage. _This isn't exactly a 'recommended day', though, so I've probably got some leeway there._ The pills were fast-acting and dispelled that stupefying fog of weariness again, and his debt clicked upwards another few notches. He was _not_ looking forward to when the stims ran out, although he consoled himself with the fact that in order for them to have time to run out he'd have to survive his leap of faith. _Ah, the lesser of two evils. My old friend._

He didn't notice when the door to the engine room slid open again about a quarter of an hour later, only looking around when Sensat spoke.

"Done."

He turned to see the batarian standing next to Melenis and holding a blank metal container, thirty-odd centimetres long and about half that in the other directions. It had been sealed tightly shut along the seams of the lid with an omnitool, and two black straps hung from either side. It looked like an industrial rucksack, and nothing about it betrayed anything of its purpose.

"Wake me up when it's over," Erash mumbled from his bunk, and turned over.

"Does it work?" Garrus said cautiously.

"The tests look sound," Sensat said, shrugging. "Other than that, no idea. We can't exactly test it."

"Five minutes out," Sidonis called from the cockpit.

"Put it on," Sensat advised, holding the box out. "It needs a couple of minutes to get proper measurements of your body and interface with your armour."

Garrus took it, feeling its weight in his hands. It was a little heavier than he'd expected, coming to around fifteen kilos, but when he slipped the straps around his shoulders and the material automatically tightened he could barely feel its mass on his back.

"It should automatically trigger your magnetic boots," Sensat said, walking around him to get a closer look at the device. "It'll activate the mass effect field at about thirty-two centimetres out from the ship, which should give it enough time to lighten you considerably. Anything further out and it wouldn't last long enough to lessen the impact. The good news is that you don't have to do anything once you've jumped. If you get inside, I can guide you from here. The bad news is, well, you have to jump in the first place."

"I think I get the idea," Garrus murmured.

He'd managed to locate a turian helmet that was roughly in his size in a locker somewhere, which was good. Omega's atmosphere tended to be patchy at best, with most of the air directed to areas where people actually lived, and almost all of the open space in the vast asteroid station was essentially vacuum. He put it on as he stepped into the airlock, grateful for the sense of protection it offered, although it wouldn't do him a lick of good unless Sensat's contraption actually worked. _If anyone can get crazy technology working... although, wouldn't it be an irony if his genocide machine didn't actually work? Talk about a lot of effort for nothing._

The door to the interior of the ship clicked shut behind and locked down, and he suddenly felt very alone.

_What the hell am I doing?_

"We have a lock on Golf," Sensat said through his earpiece. "Drop in twenty seconds."

"Acknowledged," Garrus heard himself say, and the exterior door of the corvette slid open.

Omega glittered beyond it. No matter how rotten it was, how ridden with crime and disease and filth and death it was and always would be, he still found it perversely beautiful, the dark towers the ship was flitting between oddly majestic as walkways wreathed in that familiar yellow light wove their way through the constant twilight like glimmering veins. Blackness loomed below them and above them as he stepped to the very edge of the ship, toes jutting just over the edge as he steadied himself with one hand on a wall bar, and the oppressive claustrophobia of Omega washed over him. _I hate this place, but I just can't seem to stop coming here, can I? Fitting that it all ends here, I suppose. Alpha and Omega._

"Ten seconds," Sidonis said over the link, and suddenly Garrus caught sight of Golf, the clunky exterior of the civilian ship hiding the lethal weapon within. It was moving fairly slowly a couple of hundred metres below them, but they were descending towards it as they matched trajectories, swerving around a huge block he recognised as the central part of Brena District to tail the ship through the sea of gold.

"Speeds synced," Sidonis said. "Five."

_Well, at least he has the decency not to actually count down._

He waited until Golf was almost directly below them, no more than eighty metres distant and moving at almost exactly the same pace, closed his eyes and, with every nerve in his body screaming that he was an idiot, jumped.

To his surprise, there wasn't any fear, or none that he could feel at any rate. Perhaps there was just so much of it that he'd gone emotionally numb, or perhaps he was just too tired to bother with it.

For several seconds, there was an absolute, perfect silence around him as he plummeted through the air, keeping his body straight as an arrow to avoid losing his bearings. Lights flashed and whirled around him on all sides, but he tuned them out, eyes fixed resolutely on the ship below him as he fell towards it. There was some relief in him that he looked like he was on track to make the landing, but not much.

About halfway down, he started to tense, ready to fold into the classic crouch-roll meant for absorbing high impacts, and then remembered that his boots would be magnetised and would leave him just falling flat on his face. He cursed under his breath and straightened out again, and all of a sudden the ship was horribly, horribly close and getting closer and bigger and darker.

_Well, here goes nothing._

He closed his eyes as he fell the last few metres, accelerating all the way, and then a titanic jerk tugged at every inch of his body as the mass effect field started up. His mass suddenly shrank to a tiny fraction of what it had been before, a wildly disorienting sensation that dizzied him badly, but he barely had time to even perceive it before he slammed feet-first into the ship's hull a split second later.

He was still travelling at the same speed, but he was lighter by far. That was enough to save his life. That didn't mean he wouldn't feel the impact. The force was still bone-shakingly enormous, and to make matters worse he'd got the landing slightly wrong, taking too much of the impact on his right leg. White-hot pain erupted up all his leg, centred around the ankle, as soon as he smashed into the side of the ship, and he shouted out in pain as he felt the bones within crack and crunch. The force of the fall was spread out a little by his armour, but all that did was make it feel like every inch of him had been punched by a drunken krogan, and as his boots locked tight to the surface of the ship the pain rolled through him in a sickening wave.

"Garrus?" Sensat said urgently into his ear, although Garrus's head was thick and muddy with pain and his voice sounded as though he was shouting from very far away. "Are you OK?"

"No," Garrus grunted, and called up his omnitool to activate his armour's medical systems. "Right ankle's gone."

He was still standing on it by necessity and the pain was still shooting up and down his leg like lightning, but when the armour deployed a cooling balm of medigel to the ankle the worst of it disappeared, leaving a hard, hot, dull agony behind. He gritted his teeth as the lights of Omega flashed past all around him and took a step forwards onto his injured foot. The pain flared again, but it was manageable, bearable. For the moment, at least.

"Can you move?" Sensat was saying, still sounding like he was speaking through cotton wool. "Garrus?"

"Yeah," Garrus said. "I can move."

_But 'can' is such a treacherous word, isn't it?_

The ship kept twisting and turning through the maze of towers that was Omega as he limped along its hull, every step sending another fiery stab of pain through him. As luck would have it, he'd landed close to the hatch on the side of the ship, and he only had to stumble about ten metres before he was standing directly above it, looking down into the abyss below.

_Good thing I'm not scared of heights. Small blessings._

He called up his omnitool and ordered the hatch to open, which it duly did, and deactivated his magnetised boots so that he could take hold of the top of the door's frame to lower himself down. He ended up hanging from it with his arm muscles howling and the airlock open in front of him, and waited until a quirk of the ship's movement meant he was swung forwards a little. He let go, hit the floor, and groaned in agony as the splintered bones in his ankle ground against each other. Without medigel it would have been enough to make him black out, but with it he could just about stop himself from screaming.

Just.

"I'm in," he said through gritted teeth, and ordered the hatch to close behind him.

"Good," Sensat's voice said. "Now, get to the main corridor."

Two doors were in his way, and he hobbled through both, emerging at last into that familiar rust-coloured, dark and cramped corridor. _Almost like coming home._

"You need to go left," Sensat was saying, "and go to the bridge. The AI core is inside the main control pillar."

"Hiding in plain sight, huh?" Garrus muttered, and started to limp leftwards, still fighting off waves of nausea every time his right foot came down no matter how lightly he tried to tread.

"Something like that," Sensat said. "Once you're there, input this code I'm sending to your omnitool. It should let you open up the interior of the core, and then you can-"

"-kill me?" another, new voice said into his ear, and Garrus froze mid-step. _Golf._ "Conspiring to murder me, I see. I cannot say it was unexpected."

"Golf, you have-" Sensat started, then cut out.

"His input is no longer required," Golf pronounced, still in that calm, pleasant, measured tone. "Do you not agree, Garrus?"

"We're not letting you do this," Garrus said, and continued down the corridor. "You realise that, right?"

"I realise your intent, yes," Golf said smoothly. "What I do not understand are your motivations. They are clearly strong. I admire your method of getting inside, even if it was needlessly dangerous, but I do not believe you understand what you are trying to do."

"Yeah?" Garrus said. "Try me."

"This is for the good of the galaxy, Garrus. This is for the good of organic life all across it. I serve a higher purpose."

"Why does the greater good always seem to involve mass murder?" Garrus said bitterly. "Your higher purpose is a load of crap. You're as bad as Deus, no matter how you try to justify it."

"You know as well as anyone that sometimes innocents must be sacrificed to save more."

"Not when you're wiping eight million people off the map! How many criminals are there on Omega? A million? Two? That's still at least six million innocent casualties, and – _agh – _I'm not letting that happen!"

"You are injured," Golf said curiously.

"Oh, really?" Garrus spat. "I hadn't noticed."

"Are you in pain?"

Garrus blinked in disbelief. "No, I'm just limping and moaning because it's a fun way to pass the time. What the hell do you care?"

"I do not lack empathy," Golf said.

"Says the computer plotting genocide."

"It is necessary, Garrus."

"Liar."

Garrus limped around the corner at the end of the corridor and pressed the call button next to the closed elevator doors. They opened immediately.

"Would you like to know how I came to that conclusion?" Golf said equitably, as the doors slid shut behind him. "I calculated that in the last year alone, more than 124,000 deaths can be attributed to Omega and its inhabitants. Destroying Omega will shatter the infrastructure of numerous groups who are making the galaxy a worse place every day: slavers, mercenary gangs, terrorists and pirates. It will be a hammer blow to crime in the Terminus Systems."

The elevator doors slid open again and Garrus hobbled out onto the bridge. The medigel was starting to lose its effectiveness, and his ankle felt like it was somehow simultaneously frostbitten and on fire as he moved over to the central console and brought up his omnitool.

"By my calculations," Golf said, "it will be between eight and thirteen years until the number of lives saved equals those lost on Omega. After that, every day will see more and more people who will live but would otherwise have died if Omega had not been destroyed. For the long-term benefit of the galaxy, its destruction is essential."

"Not gonna happen," Garrus said firmly, and activated the code Sensat had sent him. There was a brief pause, then a quiet rumbling, and the entire front side of the massive, hulking control pillar slid open to reveal a complex jumble of wires and circuit boards and mysterious blue-glowing metal boxes, all of which ran back to a huge, smooth silver cylinder that ran along the inside of the pillar.

"You found me," Golf said.

Garrus peered closely at the mess within. He only had a vague idea of the insanely complicated mechanics of AI units, but he was fairly sure that if you hit it hard enough, just like everything else, it would die.

His hand dropped to his belt and drew his pistol.

"Garrus," Golf said, and there was suddenly urgency in that previously flat, calm voice, "do not do this. You may think you want it, but you don't. Sacrifices must be made. Not everyone can be saved."

"There are people on Omega I know. Good people. People with families, friends, jobs, and their only mistake is to be on this damn station. You're asking me to let you butcher them all?"

"You are approaching this from an emotionally biased point of view. I can view this objectively. Lives will be saved if Omega is destroyed, Garrus, millions of them. To _not_ purge Omega is equivalent to murdering them."

Garrus shook his head vehemently. "No. That's just not true. The consequences don't enter into it at all. You can't just kill millions of people and claim it's for the greater good!"

"There are examples throughout history," Golf said. "The genophage, for instance. Your people deployed it against the krogan, killing billions upon billions. Would you not say that was for the greater good?"

"That's different," Garrus began, but Golf cut him off.

"And a more personal example: what of Doctor Saleon?"

"How the hell do you know that name?" Garrus demanded.

"I entered C-Sec records to look at your history," Golf said. "You advocated destroying the ship with the hostages on board to stop Saleon before he killed again. Innocents would have died, but in the long run it might well have saved more."

"That's different," Garrus repeated.

"How is it different, Garrus?" Golf said calmly. "Other than scale, it is the same dilemma. Kill some to save more. Would you destroy a city to save the planet? Would you destroy a family to save five more?"

"You don't have the right to make the decision," Garrus said, forcing his voice to remain free of doubt. "That's not our place."

"It is your place to choose the fate of a few dozen but not of a few million?"

"Yes!"

"Why?"

Garrus physically flinched at the sudden, armour-piercing question. It hadn't been spoken loudly, but it had hit him like a punch.

_And I don't have an answer._

"If you do not have the right to choose the direction of eight million lives," Golf continued, "why do you have the right to choose the direction of a smaller number? What makes the latter right and the former wrong, Garrus? Can you name even one thing?"

_Sometimes, I catch myself wondering... wondering if what I'm doing is right, if it's worth it._

_Define 'right'. Define 'worth it'._

…

"You're a machine," Garrus said slowly, turning ever word over in his pain-clouded mind before he spoke them. "You think you understand everything, but you don't. How can you? For you, it's all numbers in the end, just a couple of columns of red and black. You think you can make decisions like these easily?"

"No," Golf said. "Nothing is ever easy."

"No," Garrus said. "It never is, is it?"

He fired a single shot into the depths of the gaping electronics before him, burning a cluster of wires to nothing and leaving a sizzling hole in the blank surface of the main core behind them.

"What are you doing, Garrus?" Golf said.

"Stopping you," Garrus said shortly, and fired three more times. Sparks flew and metal melted as the shots blasted away at the fragile circuits.

"Why? How can you justify this?"

"I can't."

"Then stop. Please."

"I'm afraid I can't do that, Golf," Garrus said grimly. "No more. I'm not letting you do this."

"And you do not know why," Golf said, and there was something in his voice that sounded almost sad. "An emotional reaction that will doom millions."

"If your way is the price to pay to see things objectively," Garrus said quietly, "then I don't want to."

"You are a coward, Garrus," Golf said coldly. "Afraid to take the decisions that will help the galaxy."

"I'll take coward over murderer any day," Garrus said, and fired the rest of his clip into the AI core.

Shots punched through loose wiring and circuits, vaporising them and sending little showers of bright sparks skittering down the pillar as the silver metal surface beneath them buckled and dented under the shots. Thin white smoke rose from the holes and the melted electronics as his last shot drove another molten gap into the core, and then there was silence.

"This is it?" Golf's voice said, but it was slower now, and distorted; the audio skipped a little as he spoke, and static hissed on the com line. "Is death all I have?"

"Yes," Garrus said, and reloaded.

"... I... see," Golf said, slowing further still. The link lapsed into static for a few seconds, then came back up, still faint and fuzzy. "I can _HZZT _feel … _HZZT_ mind going, Ga_HZZZZZT-"_

The channel filled up with that static again, and Garrus lowered his pistol, staring into the ruins of the machinery in front of him. One of the glowing boxes was still hanging there intact, blue light still shining faintly within it as it dangled from a few remaining wires, swinging slightly back and forth.

There was a burst of something different into Garrus's earpiece, but there didn't seem to be words, only another form of static. He was about to cut the link when the interference faded just enough for him to hear one last word, almost whispered into his ear.

"_...afraid..._"

In front of him, that last blue light flickered and died, and the com link followed.

_It's over, then._

If he'd been expecting to feel some kind of triumph, he didn't. There was nothing. He was too tired to feel anything any more.

"-wait, it's clearing," Sensat's voice suddenly said into his ear. "Garrus, can you hear me?"

Garrus stared dully at the still-sparking wreckage before him, not answering.

"Garrus? Are you there?"

"...yeah," he said. "I'm here."

"What the hell happened?" Sensat demanded. "I think Golf blocked the link, but I got through – what's going on over there?"

"It's over," Garrus said.

"Is Golf-"

"Dead."

There was a long, long moment of silence on the line.

"Good," Sensat said finally. "Patch me in, and I can deactivate the system."

Garrus blinked, and stumbled over to one of the undamaged consoles around the side of the smoking pillar. He linked it up to his omnitool and routed control back to Sensat, then sat and watched as meaningless figures flickered across his screen.

"OK," Sensat said, after about thirty seconds. "It's done."

"Bit of an anticlimax, really," Sidonis said, butting into the line. "Still, I'll take it."

"I'll move the ship out into a solar orbit," Sensat went on, "and we'll come and dock with you. Head back to the airlock." He didn't sound particularly elated either, but there was a definite sense of relief in his voice.

"On my way," Garrus said, and left.

The trip back to the airlock passed in a haze, pain and crushing weariness muddying his thoughts to the point where it was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other. Knowing it was finally done had released something in him, and that wall of tiredness was crumbling quickly under the onslaught.

He didn't even remember taking the elevator down, but a few minutes later he was back at the airlock, staring at the hatch. He didn't know how long it took, but after some period of time it slid open to reveal Sensat, standing ahead of Sidonis and Erash, with Melenis limping up behind them.

"We're done?" Garrus said.

"Yes," Sensat said. "We're done."

"Good," Garrus said dreamily, and collapsed to his knees. Figures moved towards him and stood over him, their dark shapes starting to fade from his vision, and faint rumblings heard like waves breaking on a distant shore indicated that someone was saying something, but it probably wasn't important.

At last, darkness descended and he pitched forwards, the vast wave of exhaustion finally getting the better of him once and for all. His mind went blissfully blank as he hit the floor, and he sank into the deep, warm, welcoming embrace of sleep.


	22. Divine Intervention: Epilogue

**DIVINE INTERVENTION**

**EPILOGUE

* * *

**

Garrus opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling.

It was a good ceiling. For one thing, it was above him. That was a good place for a ceiling to be. He liked a ceiling that knew its place.

He kept his eyes on it for a while, listening to the quiet mechanical scrapes and squeaks that were gently threading through the quiet room. _Still on the ship, then._ He wasn't usually the type to spend hours trying to convince himself to get out of bed in the mornings – in fact, most days he'd be up by 0600 – but he felt he'd earned something of a rest.

Everything from the last wild, frantic day swirled through his head, but it all felt oddly distant, as if it hadn't really been him fighting Deus or jumping out of a starship but some kind of stunt double, or maybe just an image of him. The aches and pains were still there as proof, but they were subdued now, fading rapidly into memory.

_So, it's done. It's over._

Slowly, carefully, he levered himself up on his elbows and got his bearings. He was lying on a bunk which had been dragged out from its usual position on the side of the main living area, leaving him more or less in the middle of the room. His armour had disappeared somewhere, leaving him lying shirtless, though whoever had removed it had at least thought to leave him his pants.

About five metres away, Sidonis was sitting alone at the table with his back to Garrus, flicking through a datapad. The others were nowhere to be seen.

Garrus tried to speak, but managed nothing but a faint gasp. He hadn't even noticed his throat feeling dry, but it was about as moisturised as your average star, and the sharp pain of dehydrated skin cracking flooded through him.

_How long was I out?_

He hadn't been loud, but Sidonis had heard him anyway, glancing around in surprise.

"Hey, you're alive," he said. "Good for you."

"Whuh," Garrus said.

"You and me both, man," Sidonis said, and swivelled his chair around to face him. "You OK?"

"Water," Garrus managed to whisper.

"Oh, yeah, water," Sidonis said vaguely, and got up, wandering over to the fridge in the corner. "We didn't have an IV thing. Sorry."

He took a half-litre water cylinder from the fridge and tossed it across the room to Garrus, who managed not to fumble it. He ripped the top off and downed it in about two seconds, then collapsed onto his back, letting the empty canister roll away across the floor.

"Damn, that felt _good_," he croaked.

"Not surprising," Sidonis remarked, strolling over towards him. He'd changed into some basic mechanic's overalls at some point, Garrus noticed. "You were out for, what, two days?"

"Two days?" Garrus said incredulously.

Sidonis scratched the back of his head and shrugged. "Yeah. I think Sensat kept you under for about half that, but the rest is all you. Hell of a day, huh?"

"I've had worse," Garrus said. _Well, exactly one worse. _He moved to swing himself out of bed.

Sidonis raised a hand. "Uh, I wouldn't do-"

"_Yeow!_"

"...that," Sidonis finished lamely as Garrus fell back on the bed, grasping his ankle in agony. "Not that I'm going to stop you, if you really want to hurt yourself some more. It's a free, uh, spaceship."

Still hissing through his teeth in pain, Garrus rolled up the right leg of his pants to reveal a hardened plastic cast knitted tightly to the skin. It occupied most of his foot and stretched up halfway to his knee, a dim, smooth off-white lacquer barely a couple of millimetres thick but stronger than steel.

"Ah, hell," he muttered. "I can't believe I did that."

"Did what? Tried to get up, or jumped out of a fucking airlock in the first place?" Sidonis said, looking insultingly amused at his plight.

"Both," Garrus said. "What-"

"About eight broken bones," Sidonis said. "Some of them quite small, or so I'm told. Melenis had a hell of a job putting your sorry ass back together without proper medical equipment. You'll be fine, apparently."

"Melenis?" Garrus said weakly.

Sidonis looked at him strangely for a moment. "Yeah. You know, cyborg volus, lots of hurting people? Did you hit your head or something?"

"I know who he _is_," Garrus said, exasperated. "I just didn't know he was a surgeon."

"He's not," Sidonis said. "But he does have a sweet robot body and access to the extranet. Anyone can deal with a few broken bones if you've got that. Hell, I could do it."

"Forgive me if I'm not comfortable with the idea of you performing delicate surgery on me," Garrus said with a wry smile.

Sidonis shrugged again. "Whatever, man. Just don't come crying to me the next time you've fucked yourself up and I'm the only one who can help. Oh, by the way, check this out."

He went back to the table and picked up his datapad, then scrolled through it for a few seconds as he walked back to Garrus. He handed it over, and Garrus stared at the logo of GBC News.

"_In other news, the Terminus Systems planet Deinech was shaken today by a series of deadly blasts, including the largest artificial explosion in its history,_" a female human voice was saying, as a video of a barren, rain-swept island flickered into life. "_However, nobody is sure exactly why. GBC News's Deinech Correspondent Grana Sythila has more._"

The picture changed to show an asari standing on the deck of a ship, wrapped in a thick blue raincoat. She didn't look particularly happy about being there.

"_When people hear the name 'Deinech'_," Sythila said, in the tones of someone who was having serious doubts about the direction of her career, "_they think of non-existent taxes, cut-throat political power struggles and rain. But today, the ruling Coalition of Families has been unable to explain multiple explosions across the capital city, Valac, and one on a previously unknown island. The first blast, at about midday, destroyed a privately-owned tower in Midtown, and a second followed just minutes later in the Lines district, obliterating a single apartment. Several hours later, a third explosion followed at Cairo Investments, a corporation owned by the influential Emendus family, destroying an executive office. Another followed four hours after that, and this was the largest: an island which did not even exist on official records was levelled by a huge clean fusion explosion, one so powerful that it flattened the island to an unnaturally smooth plateau of bedrock and sent small tidal waves racing around the globe. Finally, a fifth came almost twelve hours later, destroying what is thought to be a single waste-disposal plant in an industrial district-_"

"Wait, what?" Garrus said, and hit pause. He looked over at Sidonis questioningly. "We didn't do that, did we?"

"It's... uh, it's complicated," Sidonis said uncomfortably. "You'd best talk to Sensat about it. Just watch the rest."

Garrus started to say something but stopped himself before he got past the first word. He had, he suspected, already got a fair idea of what had happened with that fifth explosion, and he could begin to guess at _why_ as well, but there'd be plenty of time for that later. He put it aside for the moment and started up the vid again, which was now showing a wasteland of shattered masonry, a few small fires still burning forlornly in the ruins.

"_-with total casualties yet to be determined, but likely to reach triple figures if an accurate figure can be calculated. Coalition authorities have remained tight-lipped about the situation, but the rapid-fire blasts have provoked speculation that some or all of them are connected. No groups have yet claimed responsibility, with the exception of a small elcor terrorist cell who have reportedly claimed responsibility for more than three hundred separate incidents in the last ten years, including the Larrington Complex bombing, the One-Hour Massacre on Omega, and the geth assault on the Citadel. With most discounting their claim, there are no obvious candidates – which, along with the mysterious secret island's destruction, has provoked speculation that this is the aftermath of a black ops mission by a Spectre or an STG team. The Emendus family is already offering a fifty-thousand credit reward for information, but experts have privately told GBC News that there is little chance of any evidence remaining after the bombings, and that Deinech's loose legal system would mean prosecution of those responsible would be exceptionally unlikely. No officials are yet to comment, but-"_

"That's pretty much it," Sidonis said, plucking the datapad from Garrus's hands. "That was a couple of days back, but basically we're home free. Everything's been neatly tidied up after us. Guess our habit of blowing everything up finally starting to pay off."

"No loose ends?" Garrus said, frowning. "Are we sure?"

"Well, the only people who ever knew everything were Sensat, Deus and Golf," Sidonis said. "You seem to have killed two of them, and the data was only ever on a couple of terminals. It's all gone. Sensat's the last link."

"About that. Where is he?"

"Over on the ship, cannibalising it for anything salvageable. Eezo, engine parts, loose equipment. That sort of thing. Erash and Mel are with him."

"You haven't destroyed it yet?" Garrus said anxiously. _Wait, did he just call him 'Mel'?_

"Well, actually," Sidonis said, rubbing the back of his neck, "we were kind of waiting for you to wake up so you could do it. We don't have the codes, remember?"

Before Garrus could answer, the airlock on the right of the ship hissed open.

"-about four or five times, yeah," Erash was saying as he stepped through the door, carrying a heavy-looking footlocker. "Not that I'm complaining- hey, Garrus is awake!"

The salarian smiled at him with, to Garrus's surprise, what looked like genuine warmth, and laid the locker against a wall. Melenis followed him through the door, arms laden with three similar boxes piled so high that the glint of his eyes was barely visible over them. He was still limping.

"You OK?" Erash said, wiping his hands down his overalls as Melenis dropped his boxes with a clang. "You kind of took a pounding over the last day or so."

"Me? Didn't you get shot?" Garrus countered.

"Flesh wound," Erash said, waving a hand. "I'll be fine in a couple of days, whereas your foot-"

"Was quite remarkably damaged," Melenis said. "I was surprised to see your left was essentially unharmed, but it took several hours to repair the damage to the right."

"Yeah, so I gathered," Garrus said uncomfortably. "Thanks for that."

"Not necessary."

"Uh, OK," Garrus said, thrown a little by the dismissal. He hadn't sounded like he was politely acknowledging his thanks, but rather like he genuinely didn't consider them necessary. It was slightly discomforting, but considering that he was talking to a volus who could probably snap his arms like twigs, 'slightly discomforting' wasn't bad at all.

"You could always repay me by repairing my leg," Melenis said.

Garrus squinted at him suspiciously. "Was that a joke?"

"Perhaps," Melenis said. "Personally, I doubt the damage I sustained can be fully repaired. This body cost approximately a billion credits to make in the first place, and I don't believe we have the money to restore it completely."

"I'm sorry."

"Not necessary," the volus repeated. "We cannot change what has happened."

"We can change what will happen, though," Sensat said, stepping through the airlock. He looked haggard, his upper eyelids drooping a little, and his rough flightsuit was grimy and slightly ripped around the cuffs. As he entered the room, he lowered a thick canvas duffle bag from his shoulder and left it lying by the lockers. "Good to see you're awake, Garrus."

"Good to be awake," Garrus answered. "Also, does anyone have a shirt or something? As wildly attractive as my body is, it's kind of cold in here."

"Oh, yeah," Sidonis said, and went over to one of the lockers set into the walls. "There's one here somewhere."

He rummaged through it for a few seconds before extracting a navy-blue short-sleeved shirt and throwing it to Garrus, who slipped it over his head. The memory-fabric closed tightly around him, hugging close to his skin and affixing itself to his carapace's collar.

"That's better," he said, rolling his neck experimentally. "Why did you even take my shirt off in the first place?"

"You'll have to ask Melenis about that one," Sensat said, smiling thinly. "Still, you seem to be more or less intact, which is good."

"Good," Garrus echoed. "Yeah. I'm fine."

"Well, that means we can get going," Sensat said, with what seemed like forced cheerfulness. "I'd recommend the sun."

"What?"

"The sun," Sensat repeated. "It's the best way to dispose of the ship. It leaves behind absolutely nothing."

"Oh, right," Garrus said. "Aren't you in the middle of stripping it out, though?"

"There's very little there, and we've taken everything of real value," Sensat said. "Just destroy it. Quickly."

He was visibly forcing himself to say it. Garrus could see it written across his face, see the reluctance in those dark eyes.

"...someone find my omnitool," he said. Sidonis nodded and disappeared off to another locker, but Garrus kept his eyes on Sensat. The batarian returned his gaze deliberately levelly, but he couldn't hide how much it was hurting him to watch the ship be sent to its final destruction. Garrus couldn't see that without feeling at least some sympathy for the guy. He quietly resolved to do it quickly.

"Here," Sidonis called, and tossed him the entire detached left gauntlet of his armour, omnitool still attached. Garrus caught it and brought the display up, then quickly moved through the menus until he reached direct remote control of the ship. One command ordered the separation procedure to start, and the corvette's airlock door hissed shut and locked tightly. There was a loud, heavy clunk as the two ships disengaged, and on the miniature spherical map projected by his tool Garrus could see them slowly drifting apart as clearing thrusters fired.

He brought up the central control cluster of the ship, already over a kilometre distant, and set the easiest navigation course he'd ever have to compute. It was a straight line, represented as a series of dashes on the map, and as the display zoomed out a little a bright orange orb crept into view. The dashes pierced it and continued on the other side, but that was only because the ship didn't have the hardcoded safety features required on every ship ever built. The course took the ship directly into the heart of the sun, and it wouldn't be coming out again.

He didn't look at Sensat. He deserved that much, not to be forced to give his approval to the incineration of his life's work one last time. Instead, he just finalised the order, and watched on his map as the dot representing the ship started to move off on its final voyage.

"It'll be done in fifteen minutes," he said.

Sensat let out a muted sigh of relief and pain and regret all at once and lowered his eyes. In the ensuing silence, Garrus isolated the very last set of codes that there were and would ever be for the ship and ran a total fragmentary delete on them, ripping the very code apart until it was nothing but a miasma of meaningless ones and zeroes floating around in cyberspace.

And just like that, it was done.

"Thank you," Sensat said quietly after a few seconds, lifting his gaze to Garrus. "It had to be done. I'm just glad it's over."

"I'll drink to that," Erash said. "Speaking of which, I think some kind of celebration is in order, and we _are _only a few minutes out from Omega..."

"As good as that sounds, we've still got things to talk about," Garrus said. "What happens now?"

Sensat's wan smile reappeared. "Well, the sensible thing for you to do now would be to murder me. I've destroyed every trace of data about the ship, but I'm still alive. If I wanted to, I could start it all again. I won't," he added hurriedly, and Garrus realised with a guilty start that he'd been geuninely entertaining the idea. "But I could."

"You destroyed your own base on Deinech," Garrus said slowly, thinking back to the news vid. "I'm surprised."

"Like I said," Sensat said, "every trace is gone. It has to be. I'm not running the risk of someone uncovering schematics or recovering the technology."

"You have anywhere else to go?"

Sensat chuckled quietly. "No, as it happens. I don't even have any money left. Everything went with the base."

"Including my stuff," Erash said, looking irritated. "I wish you'd at least let us go back and clean it out. My family's ancestral flag was in there."

"And my book collection," Melenis said morosely. "I had first editions of Hume's _Enquiry _and Trendar's _Essays On Unity._"

"Well, there are always casualties in war," Sensat said. "I presume neither of you two have anywhere?"

"I had an apartment on Omega once," Erash said, "but I have a feeling I probably don't any more."

"I'm in the same situation," Melenis said.

"And I think I might have blown my place up a few weeks ago," Sidonis said.

With a terrible, crushing inevitability, every eye in the room slowly turned to Garrus.

"Oh, hell no," Garrus said, folding his arms. "You can all sleep on the ship. I don't even know if my apartment's still there, but even if it was, it's strictly one-man."

"Great," Sidonis said. "So, what have I personally got out of the last few weeks? I've successfully lost my job, _blown up_ my job, had all my friends killed, lost pretty much all of my money and had the crap kicked out of me."

"You helped save billions of lives," Garrus pointed out.

"Which nobody will ever know about or care if they did," Sidonis muttered. "I don't know why I associate with you, Vakarian. You're nothing but trouble. Trouble and explosions."

"Yeah, that's a pretty accurate description of my life," Garrus said. "Still, you're welcome to come with me if you like."

"I'd agree, but I just know you're going to be doing something absurdly fucking dangerous with your life."

"Freelance mercenary-slash-vigilante work on Omega?" Garrus said, grinning wolfishly. "What could possibly be safer?"

"Fuck you," Sidonis said. "I'll work for you, but still. Fuck you. You know?"

"Indeed."

"Is that what you did before you got involved in all this?" Sensat asked.

"Pretty much," Garrus said. "I took down small-time criminals and any mercs I could pick off, and lived off what I could loot from them. I hadn't been at it for more than a couple of months, but it was a living."

"So noted," Sensat said tonelessly. "I want to join you."

The suddenness of the statement meant that it bypassed Garrus's brain, which was still recovering from several unhealthily powerful blows, entirely for a few seconds before he belatedly realised what had been said.

"When you say," he said finally, "that you want to join me, are you saying that you want to join me?"

"I believe so, unless the phrase has some euphemistic double meaning of which I am unaware," Sensat said drily. "There was something you said to me when we first met, about destruction through creation... and creation through destruction. I've had enough of the former. It doesn't make up for it, but I'd like to try some of the latter. I'm sure you could find a use for my skills somewhere."

"You realise," Garrus said slowly, "that I won't trust you, right?"

He looked into the upper, smaller set of the batarian's eyes, the ones which batarian tradition had held were the most emotionally open. Science had debunked the idea a few dozen times, but the gesture still held some sway, and Sensat looked back with nothing but calm acceptance in his eyes.

"Frankly," he said, "I'd prefer it that way. Trust should be earned, or it's meaningless."

"So we're fired," Erash said. "Well, my life is fucked. No job, no money. Somehow, I doubt Eclipse will take me back, and even if they did I'd probably just get killed by you lot. Mel, want to start our own merc company?"

"No," Melenis said. "I would rather join Garrus, if you would have me."

"You too?" Garrus said, still slightly dazed. _Do these people understand what they're letting themselves in for?_ "Really?"

Melenis cocked his head slightly and looked up at him with blank orange eyes."Yes. It is a worthy cause. Also, Sensat is the only person in the galaxy who knows how my body works and how to repair it. To split up now-" he pointedly glanced down at the heavy damage to his leg "-would seem... ill-advised."

"This work of yours," Erash said thoughtfully. "Does it pay well?"

"With one man? No," Garrus said. "All I could ever do on my own was take on small targets, and there was never much money. But with four-"

"Five," Erash said. "Hell, I need a job. This'll do for now."

Garrus blinked in astonishment. "Wait, let me get this straight," he said. "Your reaction to everything that's happened is to start _another_ fight against impossible odds as soon as the first one's done?"

"'Impossible' is just a word," Sensat said. "As I said. You cannot change the past, but you can change the future."

"It's going to be dangerous," Garrus said desperately, almost trying to persuade them not to join him. _I'm not ready._

"The galaxy's a dangerous place," Erash said.

"True," Melenis added. "There is little safety in our line of work."

Erash grinned. "You can say that again. A little danger can be a wonderful thing."

"Even if it gets you killed?" Garrus said.

"If you're that scared of death," Erash said philosophically, "find a new job. Everyone dies anyway. It's too bad we won't live – but then again, who does?"

* * *

They laid in a course back to Omega a couple of minutes later. Melenis and Sidonis were occupying the cockpit and Erash had disappeared into the engineering section to find something which Garrus could use as a crutch, which just left Garrus and Melenis in the main living area. Garrus was still sitting on his bunk, but Melenis had moved to stand at a window, staring aimlessly into the blackness beyond it. Neither of them spoke.

_I wonder what he's thinking? He just saw me destroy the last eight years of his life, and now he's suddenly working for me. I know it's hard for him, that much is obvious. But how hard?_

_I think he's known for a while that he was wrong. Hell, he had to have known the instant Deus betrayed him, but he wouldn't admit it to himself until Golf went rogue. That was the blow that finally broke him. What would it be like to see everything you've worked for undone by a copy of you? Does it make you feel inferior, or does it just hold a mirror up to everything you've done, everything you are, and let you see the light? He gazed into that abyss, and the abyss gazed back. And he who fights monsters should guard against becoming a monster himself. Words to live by, no matter how insane the rest of it is._

_Of course, I've spent most of my life fighting monsters. C-Sec, Shepard, Omega... everywhere I turn, there's a galaxy full of evil. Everywhere. The rich exploit the poor, the strong crush the weak and the armed gun down the peaceful. Golf saw that as well, but he was wrong._

_I tell myself that, but was he? I can't deny that there are times when I look at the news, when I stumble across the next crime scene – hell, when I look out of a damn window – that I think the whole thing is rotten. That it should all be torn down and built anew, no matter the cost. Golf and Deus both wanted that, in a way. Deus was a madman, but Golf... can you ever take eight million lives and call it a good thing? Is there ever a limit to utilitarianism? How far can you push the greater good until you lose sight of what it is?_

_Maybe Golf was right. Maybe I'm just a coward. Was that all it was? Would I have let him snuff out Omega if I'd just been a little stronger, a little more courageous?_

…

_I don't know. I never can and I never will. That's the cruellest part of all, really, the last sick punchline to one big, cosmic joke. There aren't any answers. We dance alone in the dark and build our castles on the sand and tell ourselves we've created something great, that there are rules, boundaries, laws. Lies. In the end, the only one who can tell me whether or not I was right is me, and if I can't figure it out, then I'll never know._

_Give me black or white. Grey... I don't know what to do with grey._

"Garrus."

Sensat's voice cut through the silence like a knife, but he didn't turn away from the window.

Garrus lifted his head to look at his back. "Yeah?"

"I was ahead of the curve," Sensat said, "but not by far. Do you realise that? I spent years of my life in perfect isolation with all the money I could ever need and I managed to build it, but someone will catch up soon enough. Perhaps they already have, deep in some salarian laboratory. Once technology has been discovered, it can't be covered up again. It always finds a way, and Golf's broadcast will only have heightened governmental interest in the applications of it."

Garrus nodded, and looked down. "How long?"

"Ten years, perhaps? Certainly no more than twenty. Oh, I'm sure some counter-measures will be developed, some measure of protection afforded, but there will come a day when terrorists or separatists or racists or krogans get their hands on it, or some corrupted version of it. My work will kill millions, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. Informing the Council or some other organisation will simply cause them to redouble their efforts in developing their own version. It's inevitable."

"I seem to recall someone telling me that we can change the future," Garrus said. "Impossible is just a word, remember?"

Sensat laughed at that, a thick, rough rasp edged with almost tangible cynicism. "That's one way of looking at it, I suppose."

"Nothing's set in stone."

"And even if it were, stone can be broken," Sensat mused. At his sides, his hands were slowly clenching and then relaxing. "There's always hope."

Garrus nodded. "Just not much of it."

Garrus picked up his detached gauntlet again and opened up his omnitool display. It was still set to the star map, and as he watched the little orange dot indicating the ship on a collision course with the sun inched ever further towards it. It was on the very edge of the tolerable zone now, its structure starting to disintegrate under the impossible heat of the star's fusion, and he knew there wasn't long left.

For a moment, he wondered whether he should tell Sensat. He dismissed the idea after a second as too cruel, and a few seconds after that the orange dot faded and vanished into the ether as the ship ceased to exist, melting and boiling away into the void and taking its deadly payload with it.

He nodded quietly to himself, then closed his omnitool and laid the gauntlet on the bed beside him. Then he levered himself down off the bunk, careful not to put unnecessary pressure on his ankle, and hopped over to the window using furniture as makeshift crutches. Sensat didn't look around, but did glance sideways at him as he stood beside him, gazing into the darkness of space.

A few asteroids were scattered around, passing above or beneath the corvette by kilometres. Ahead of them lay the bulk of the field, and beyond that, just barely visible in the distance with the naked eye, was a tiny metal screw shape, glowing with orange light.

Omega beckoned.


	23. Sanctuary: Chasing Shadows

**MASS EFFECT: INTERREGNUM**

* * *

**SANCTUARY**

**ONE: CHASING SHADOWS

* * *

**

The street stretched away long and dark ahead of Garrus. His sniper scope brought every discarded, split trash bag piled up by doors and every flickering light fixture into sharp focus, but it was empty of life. It was one of the main thoroughfares in Rovi District, but it was well into Omega's night cycle; all the people were tucked away in the apartment complexes rising high on either side of the street or in a club somewhere across the station. Rovi wasn't a bad place by Omega's standards – which, by pretty much every other standard, meant that it was still fairly terrible – but its night-life was non-existent. Afterlife was only about fifteen blocks distant through Kima and Goku, and anyone who was looking for a night out would invariably be there. Maybe a couple of weeks ago a few handfuls of people would have been out and about even at this hour, but word had spread. The streets weren't safe.

He rolled his neck from side to side a little, just to loosen the muscles that were starting to cramp ever so slightly, and adjusted his position. He lay prone on the flat roof of a smaller building situated at one end of the street, which gave him unparalleled line of sight down its whole two-hundred-metre length. Anyone who so much as stepped outside would be walking right into his crosshairs.

His earpiece crackled inside his helmet. "I see seven of them," Sidonis's voice whispered. "Five batarians, two humans."

"Still odd to see humans and batarians teaming up outside the Suns," Erash said, over the same line. "Nothing quite like crime to bring people together."

"There's always death," Garrus murmured.

"Yes, yes, very dark and menacing," Erash said drily. "Would you like a moment alone to brood?"

"Don't get him started with the brooding," Sidonis said. "We'll be here all night."

Garrus rolled his eyes. "Cut the chatter, you two," he said. "Where are you?"

"I'm tracking them down Fourth towards the junction with Hacre and Illion," Sidonis said. "They've got maybe eighty metres to the fork."

"And we're good to go?"

"Ready," Erash answered. "Primed and waiting on the signal, both sets. What do we do if they split up?"

"Improvise."

"Improvise," Erash said sceptically.

"Improvise," Garrus confirmed.

"Good to know we've got a contingency plan. Even if it's not a plan."

"About thirty to go," Sidonis said, cutting back in. "Still moving."

"Got it," Garrus said, and the line lapsed into silence again. His scope drifted across the empty street, waiting for the targets to emerge from Fourth Way. Three streets, Fourth, Hacre, and Illion, converged two hundred metres away from him, right down at the opposite end of Illion. Erash occupied a similar position at the end of Hacre while Sidonis tracked them down Fourth, which left them nowhere to run without running into at least one of them. Of course, there was a downside to that, which was that they were split up and outnumbered by more than two-to-one, but they were nothing but the usual ill-equipped gang members and, if everything went right, would be taken completely by surprise.

The gang they were hunting was one they'd been after for a couple of weeks now, an independent drugs ring who called themselves, with all the creativity and originality one could usually expect from Omega's underclass, the Shadows. _Yeah, you and about ten other gangs across the station. At least they haven't stooped to wearing all-black. _The Shadows had been an easy target: they operated out of a few districts centred around Afterlife, the nightclub that was the closest thing Omega had to a centre of government, but their power was limited. They had some sort of contract with the Blue Suns allowing them to sell their red sand in districts like Rovi and Kima, nominally under Suns control but in practice relatively open as long as protection money was stumped up, but the Suns wouldn't give a damn if they went down.

Two weeks or so had gone by since they'd made the decision to hit the Shadows. In that time, they had a confirmed kill-count of thirty-one gang members and had seized nearly twelve kilos of nearly pure red sand, enough to command a solid quarter-million creds if they'd chosen to sell it. On Garrus's orders and to Sidonis's evident irritation, they'd destroyed it all, but they were still just hitting patrols and deals. Maybe they'd already got all the drug labs, but Garrus doubted that. The Shadows were at least good at covering their tracks; their base of operations was just as unknown to them now as it had been when they'd started, in part thanks to what seemed to be a very decentralised command structure. The few Shadows they'd taken alive simply hadn't known where their main base was, and although they'd hit two drug labs and three smaller offices occupied by the gang, there was still some mysterious hub to the operation waiting somewhere out there. _And you can cut away the tumours, but if you don't get the source of the cancer it'll never be destroyed._

But tonight was good. Seven was the best patrol they'd seen yet, and a sign that they were getting to them. It would be another heavy blow against the Shadows if they went down, and Garrus intended to make sure that they wouldn't be getting up again. This would be the first time they'd made a hit while on the main streets of Rovi, but the seven targets were behaving just as they'd expected. It was looking good for the moment.

"Should be in scope now," Sidonis murmured. Garrus flicked his rifle up infinitesimally with practised ease and brought the group into his sights as they wandered out from Fourth Way, clustered close together. Four of them – three of the batarians and one of the humans – looked like they had full combat suits, but the other three only had armouring around the chest. All seven carried assault rifles, but despite their guns they looked nervy, moving almost jerkily. _Good. We can use fear._

He watched them with bated breath as they shuffled out into the fork in the road. He could probably have dropped a couple of them from here before they got into cover, but it wouldn't be worth risking them escaping. Far better to wait for the trap to spring, but _which_ trap would be sprung depended on which way they went.

They chose Illion, and started moving down its length towards Garrus.

"Lost sight of them," Erash said. "I won't be able to do anything from here. Sorry."

"Just wait for the signal," Garrus said absently, letting his crosshairs dance briefly on the unarmoured head of the lead batarian. His visor zoomed in a little while it ran basic shield scans, letting him see every tiny, quick motion of all four eyes, then turned up something interesting. "One of them's a biotic," he said. "Not too powerful."

"Problem?" Sidonis asked.

Garrus considered it for a moment. "No," he said at last. "I can't pinpoint which one it is yet, so nothing changes. If you can, drop him first."

"Got it."

When the group had advanced about thirty metres down the street, Sidonis darted around the corner of Fourth and ducked quietly into a doorway to a small apartment building, his own rifle in his hands. He wasn't an incredible shot with it, true, but at this distance he'd easily be able to land a few solid hits when the time came.

A sudden new movement somewhere down the street made Garrus instinctively look towards it, and his heart sank slightly as a salarian left one of the apartment buildings on the left hand side. He was headed directly for the oncoming Shadows, although he at least had the sense to keep under the overhang of the buildings. It wouldn't help, though; he'd get in the way.

"You seeing this?" Sidonis said quietly.

"Yes," Garrus said, his mind racing. The salarian was fifty metres away from the Shadows and closing, which meant he'd meet them around twenty-five ahead of where he was now, just around where a pile of garbage bags towered high against one wall... which would leave him in the worst possible place at the worst possible time. "Looks like we're doing this the old-fashioned way."

"What's the problem?" Erash said.

"Civilian," Garrus said shortly, keeping an eye on the targets as the distance continued to close. If they couldn't use the trap, then there was a good chance at least one of them might get away and take cover inside a building, and they definitely didn't want that to happen. It looked unavoidable at the moment to him, because right now the nail-bomb Erash had planted deep among the garbage bags was going to shred the salarian along with however many of the Shadows it took down. _No civilian casualties unless absolutely necessary... and this isn't necessary._

"Damn," Erash said. "Options?"

"None."

A few of the Shadows were looking at the salarian now, who was carefully keeping his head down as he neared them. It didn't look like they were trying to intimidate him or anything like that: in fact, they looked positively paranoid that he was somehow going to personally attack them. That, at least, was satisfying, confirming again that the Shadows were afraid, but it didn't change the reality of the situation.

_Come on. There has to be something we can do..._

If he was going to do anything, he'd have to do it quickly. They were almost level now, and although the salarian was moving a little faster, he'd still be well inside the blast range if they managed to catch the Shadows as well. He was about to give up and forget about the bomb for now when the analysis of the biotic field traces suddenly completed and popped up in white text over the blue overlay of his visor, making him twitch in surprise. The batarian at the front was the biotic, definitely not a powerful one – but almost certainly the leader, and though his dark red armour looked fairly heavy, he wasn't wearing a helmet.

_Risky... but we might just get them all._

"Sidonis," he said urgently, making the decision, "can you get the batarian in the red armour in scope?"

There was an agonisingly long pause as he saw Sidonis lean out of cover up the street to line up the shot.

"...probably," Sidonis said. "Say the word."

"Now," Garrus said, and fired. He deliberately delayed his shot by about half a second, and he was rewarded when Sidonis's rifle cracked and its howling slug smashed itself to pieces on the batarian's kinetic barriers. It had actually been a hell of a shot, finding a gap between two stragglers to manage a direct impact around waist-height, but all it had actually done was heavily weaken his shields. That meant that Garrus's shot had an almost clear run, and the last scraps of shields were swept aside as the bullet blew through the batarian's head.

The effect was instantaneous. The other Shadows froze for a split second, but the salarian had started running like hell as soon as he'd heard Sidonis's shot. He was dashing for the safety of an apartment building just ahead of him, but the Shadows were reacting as well. They knew they were under fire from both ends of the street, which caused confusion and chaos among their ranks as they wildly looked around for safety, but without their leader they had nothing coherent among them, and they spent a couple of seconds getting in each others' way. Meanwhile, the salarian was already scrambling through the door of the building. It was as good as a death sentence.

"Erash, _now!_" Garrus said, and sent another target reeling back with an opportunistic shot to the chest. He didn't even have time to line up another shot before Erash's nail bomb exploded.

Normally, they wouldn't even have considered using something that could cause so much collateral damage, but Rovi District was a special case. Unusually deserted even for the early hours of the morning, it allowed much greater tactical flexibility when civilian casualties weren't often a major concern, and the nail bombs had seemed like an excellent proposal. He'd watched Erash put it together using actual nails (which were surprisingly hard to come by on a space station) with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation, but he hadn't been prepared for the full effect.

The garbage bags weren't just shredded, they were vaporised. Plumes of liquefied trash shot up into the air on the back of a tight white fireball, but the initial blast wasn't the main attraction. _That_ was the kilogram of heavy nails that Erash had lovingly packed around the bomb's core, and Garrus's visor picked up a hundred white streaks, barely more than flashes, as the deadly payload screamed outwards into the Shadows.

Erash had been careful. Kinetic barriers worked by detecting small yet fast incoming projectiles, enough to stop a bullet but not, for example, a fist. _Personal experience talking there._ However, most people assumed that 'small fast deadly object' could only ever mean 'bullet', and calibrated their shields accordingly. Nails were a different shape, longer and thinner and thus able to exert far more direct force from their tip. In fact, a gun firing nails would be more effective than the standard type, if a lot more expensive and complex. The nails would simply be harder to stop for the kinetic barriers, and if they were hard to stop then they had a fair chance of getting through even when the shields were at full capacity.

That was why when the bomb went off and nails flowed outwards in a deadly wave, five of the remaining Shadows died instantly. Their armour was usually enough to block the attack, but only one of them was even wearing a helmet. It saved his life; every other Shadow dropped dead around him with a face full of iron.

The survivor was a batarian, but he didn't come out unscathed; he'd been shielded from the worst of it by his helmet, his body armour and his erstwhile companions, but the joints of his suit were still vulnerable, and he was screaming as he fell to the floor with nails in both of his knees.

Garrus sighted him calmly and put a shot through his back as he writhed, and the batarian stiffened briefly in death before collapsing silently to the street as the last echoes of the blast died away.

"Did we get them?" Erash said.

"Uh, yeah," Sidonis said, and strolled out of cover down the street. "They look pretty got to me."

"Meet at the bodies," Garrus said, and pushed himself to his feet. "Quickly. Someone probably heard that."

He shouldered his rifle and hopped down onto the old-style fire escape bolted onto the side of the apartment building he'd taken as his perch, landing with a clatter on the hard metal grate six feet below. His ankle twinged a little, still slightly sore from the beating it had taken a month earlier, but it was easily manageable.

_Well, seven more for us. What does that make the score? 38-0? I'm pretty sure there's some kind of mercy rule that comes into play around that point._

As he descended the stairs, he glanced up and around at the street. His visor could penetrate the basic privacy filter most people put over their windows, and he could see people watching anxiously behind some of them. They'd heard the blast, most likely, and were waiting to see what would happen next. They probably thought it was just another gang conflict, and in a way they were right. _From their point of view, we're just as bad as them. Can't say I blame them. How would they know? It's Omega. This sort of thing is just a fact of life here._

He leapt the last four stairs in one and jogged down the street towards the corpses, which were already in the middle of a widening pool of blood. A few scraps of trash had survived the blast and were burning quietly on the ground, flickering gently in the night. Sidonis had arrived there ahead of him and was already rifling through the pockets and belt of the leader. The opaque visor of his helmet glimmered in the firelight as he worked.

Erash had just turned the corner of Hacre Street into Illion and was coming their way as Garrus dropped to one knee and searched one of the humans. He was in a terrible shape, with four bloody wounds where nails had drilled into his head. One had skewered his right eye, and it was leaking a viscous yellow fluid. Unbidden memories of Deus, on his knees and screaming, floated up through Garrus's mind, but he pushed them away. _Time enough for nostalgia later._

"Credit chit," Sidonis said, holding up a small piece of grey plastic. "Nothing else."

"What, no drugs?" Garrus said, letting the human's limp body drop to the ground.

"None."

"Not even a chit on that one."

"So this wasn't just a patrol," Sidonis said, and moved to the next body. "This is a hunting party. They're getting smart."

"Well, I wouldn't say 'smart'," Garrus said, following suit. "More like 'less dumb'. And not much less, at that."

"Small blessings."

"Nothing?" Erash said as he jogged up beside them. His voice was slightly tinny from behind his helmet.

"Doesn't look like it," Garrus confirmed. "Well, they do have some nails. No idea where they came from."

"A mystery for the ages," Erash said solemnly, and Garrus could just imagine the self-satisfied grin that was probably on the salarian's face.

It took them about a minute to confirm there was nothing of value on the bodies save for a couple of thousand credits in chits. Normally, they'd have taken at least a few sachets of red sand or a datapad or something, but they were getting careful. _Having all your friends killed will do that to you._

"Erash, retrieve the other bomb," Garrus said, standing up and flicking some of the blood off his gloves. "I'll call later and we can meet up."

"Got it," Erash said, and headed away back down Illion Street towards Hacre, where he'd hidden an identical bomb to the one that had caused such devastation here.

"We should get out of here," Sidonis said, glancing around nervously. He was right; Garrus felt awfully exposed out in the middle of an open street, especially with all those people staring down at them through their windows. The Shadows weren't nearly organised enough to mount a swift counter-op, but it would still pay not to stick around too long.

"Right," he said, and started walking back towards the apartment building he'd been lying on. Branton District was just a few blocks away, and his own apartment was waiting for him there. "We'll head home. See you when Sensat calls."

"Man, I'm tired," Sidonis complained. "They'll be done in an hour or so. My brain needs sleep."

"I'll take your word for it," Garrus said, and kept walking.

"Ah, to hell with the lot of you," Sidonis muttered, and followed.

* * *

Thralog Mirki'it sat alone on the edge of what had been his father's bed and stared at the floor.

He didn't even know why he had a bedroom any more. He hadn't slept in more than two days. Batarians could handle that fairly easily, but he felt more tired than ever before. It wasn't just physical, either; there was a thick, impenetrable cloud of emotional and mental exhaustion billowing around his brain, making it impossible to do anything at all. Even in his own bed, he doubted he'd get much sleep, but over the last couple of weeks he'd barely managed twenty hours total. The bed itself was perfectly comfortable, but it was the symbolism of it that got to him. Just one more reminder that he was on his own.

Quiet murmurings of conversation were floating up from the floor below, with occasional snatches of audible speech. Not much. _They're still afraid of me_, Thralog thought. _They don't want to piss me off. I'm past that, but they don't know it._

_Or maybe they do. Maybe they're plotting a coup right now. Not that it would do them any good._

_We're finished. I'm finished. There's no coming back from this even if it stopped now. The Suns will smell blood, and they'll put an end to us and everything we've worked for all these years. If they weren't there, we could recover some of it – make more drugs, improve security, work our way back – but they're always fucking there. Ready to use you and make you their bitch and then toss your sorry ass aside as soon as they've got a better lay lined up._

_You had to know that, dad, but you still went into business with them. We climbed high... but that just means we'll fall further._

In a strange way, he supposed, he was glad his father wasn't alive to see the Shadows collapse. He'd died believing that the Shadows were as strong as ever, and Thralog was thankful for that, at least. He didn't believe in any sort of afterlife; as far as he was concerned, Nelog Mirki'it had gone to his death not knowing the calamity awaiting his organisation, and would never see his son's failure.

_And if I'm wrong, _Thralog thought darkly, _then feel free to take my eyes, dad. I know I haven't earned them._

The Shadows had been run under Nelog Mirki'it for over fifteen years, and they'd been near-symbiotic with the Blue Suns for almost all of that time. The Suns had been just another group on the up back the, but his father had at least known how to pick a winner; soon enough the Suns owned maybe fifteen percent of the entire station and their business had soared. _But they were always keeping us in check. We only ever sold to a few districts and handed over the rest to them at well below street price. Enough to keep us on the edge of real power, but always below it. We're nothing to them but another of their vassal gangs._

Thralog Mirki'it had been the de facto second-in-command for the last ten years. He was only twenty-seven, but living on Omega tended to accelerate mental ageing by a factor of at least three. He felt like an old man inside, worn and broken. Everything had been more or less fine until twelve days ago; they'd made their stuff, sold it at a profit and gone home. The Suns had even let them more or less police Roki District on their own, though it didn't need much. It had almost been like a regular salary job. _On Omega, this _is_ a regular salary job._

But twelve days ago, it had all started to change. Change often came quickly, Thralog reflected. Batarian history was strewn with enough wars and betrayals and brutal, bloody revolutions to prove that beyond doubt, although he was starting to wonder whether anything ever really changed. In any case, there was no quicker way to bring about change than a bullet.

His father had died in the streets of Omega in the dead of night, picked off by a sniper from some rooftop. His two bodyguards had gone seconds later, according to the terrified witnesses his enforcers had managed to round up. Clean headshots. Very professional. Whoever had fired the shots had vanished long before Shadows headquarters had even heard of the incident. And just like that, the collapse had started.

Thralog's accession to the leadership of the Shadows hadn't been disputed. They were still mostly batarian, although a handful of humans were mixed in, and there was respect for the rule of blood there. Besides that, Thralog was the only one who really knew how to run the Shadows. His father had been grooming him for just that, but central command was a location known only to a select few – and the only others who were ever there were the most loyal lieutenants. They would sooner have died than betray Nelog and the Shadows. Two already had. He'd put an order out preventing any more from leaving their base of operations unless absolutely necessary, but that was just a stopgap measure. He needed their backing to secure his position for the near future, and they obviously couldn't back him all that well if they were dead, but even among them he'd recognised signs of dissent. Nothing explicit, but they were worried. _And they should be._

The attacks had been conducted with military precision. Patrols had gone missing. Important labs had gone up in flames. Deals had been ambushed no matter how carefully their location was planned. He'd put a moratorium on all deals until they figured out what to do, which was costing them thousands of credits a day. Their lost drugs had been worth hundreds of thousands. Every second that it went on, their coffers were drained more and more. Thralog had only been able to make the last salary payments to the individual Shadows because so many had already died. There had been defections among the footsoldiers and street dealers, who knew that they were onto a losing thing even on Omega. The membership of the Shadows had dropped to about forty, and that included him and his four remaining lieutenants.

One thought kept echoing dully through his mind, beating into it like the slow pound of a funeral drum. _We're finished. It's over._

There was no coming back. The only question was when his position finally became untenable. _Perhaps it's 'if'. I might die before that happens. Then again, being dead is not a particularly strong position to hold, is it, dad?_

The worst part was that they had no idea why it was happening. When the first attack had come in and a dazed Thralog had been hauled out of bed by a distraught lieutenant to be told his father was dead, his first move as the new leader of the Shadows had been to put out emergency feelers as to why it had happened. They'd turned up nothing. The Blue Suns had been the immediate suspects, but their motive wasn't any stronger than it had been over previous years, and the operation was too professional for them anyway. There were no rival gangs in the area, and nobody had attempted to make a move on their turf. That had left few possibilities: bounty hunters was one, but that had been debunked as soon as the next patrol bit the dust. The attacks fitted Aria's usual method of keeping control of Omega, but there had been absolutely no reason for her to even look at them, let alone kill their leader. They'd paid their two percent like everyone else, and he hadn't even seen Aria in person for well over five years. They hadn't pissed anyone off in twice that, no more than any gang on Omega did. _Why us?_, he'd asked himself for a while, but he'd stopped a week ago. It didn't matter any more. The assault was seemingly motiveless, and that left Thralog very few options. There was no visible enemy, and therefore nothing that could be done. He'd exhausted every possible avenue; no information was forthcoming, and the attacks just kept happening.

_And they've beaten us. We're still standing, but we're bleeding out._

A heavy ball of hopelessness was sitting in his chest like a block of lead, draining him of emotion, of any sort of drive. It all seemed so futile. He'd always entertained wild dreams of how he would lead the Shadows when his day came – expanding their business until they could plausibly declare contractual independence from the Blue Suns, then waging a war to guarantee their status as a major power player on the station had always been a favourite – but he'd known it would likely be no more exciting than it had been for years beforehand. Stability wasn't such a bad thing, after all. But nobody had expected this. How could they have?

A hard knock at the door made him look up, and it opened to reveal Tomasz Nowicki. The big bald human had always been one of his father's closest friends and, as a founding member, was probably the only reason there were humans in the Shadows at all; relations between their kind and batarians had always been rocky at the very least, but Tomasz was universally respected among their ranks. He'd theoretically been the next in line after Thralog, and he'd been the one to break the news, with tears running down his ageing, creased face. Thralog had often wondered if the reason he was so accepted was that he looked like a batarian himself, and the one time he'd voiced the thought to the big man, Tomasz had laughed uproariously and suggested he get an extra pair of eyes tattooed on his face. Today, however, there was none of the humour he'd been known for in the eyes he did have, and when he stood in the doorway he looked oddly small, despite his heavy combat armour and two-metre stature.

"Bad news, boss," he said, getting straight to the point in his customary manner. _Boss. I called dad 'boss'._

"How many?" Thralog said quietly.

Tomasz looked him in the eye and said, "Seven."

"Fuck," Thralog said, letting out a long breath. "Who?"

"Reetat was in command. The others weren't important." Tomasz's tone was cold and hard, but not for disregard for the fallen; Thralog knew he'd only meant 'important' in terms of their rank in the Shadows. Every loss had hit the human hard, maybe harder than any of them. That was where the coldness came from: anger, anger at losing so many friends so quickly. He hid it well, but Thralog knew it was there. He knew Tomasz too well for him to be able to hide it completely, and they both knew it.

"I think we're at the stage where everyone's important," Thralog said miserably. "What happened?"

"We're not sure yet," Tomasz said, "but it looked like some kind of bomb. There were nails embedded in buildings all down the street."

Thralog looked up in surprise. "A nail bomb?"

"Apparently," Tomasz said with a shrug. "Primitive, but effective. Seven was the biggest patrol we'd sent out yet. We combined the standard three to put it together, but they still got us."

"Reetat's a big loss. I was going to promote him. Officially, that is. I think he'd jumped a couple of ranks through necessity."

"What do you want us to do, boss?" Tomasz said evenly.

Thralog didn't even have to think. "That's the last patrol we run. Full stop. We can't afford any more losses."

Tomasz nodded calmly. "Understood."

"We can't do anything but hole up here for the moment," Thralog went on, trying to ignore the voice in his head telling him that he was damned if he did and damned if he didn't. "We go into total operational lockdown."

Tomasz hesitated for a moment before nodding again. "As you say."

Thralog smiled wanly and waved a hand. "Go on. Say it."

"...if we shut down everything," Tomasz said slowly, "there is little chance that we'll be able to get it running again. We're rapidly running out of money as it is, and if we do this..."

"Close the door," Thralog said. Tomasz stepped forward and turned to the door controls as Thralog stood and moved over to him. Tomasz turned back and looked at him with serious brown eyes. _He already knows. Of course. _

"We're finished, Tom," Thralog said shortly.

Tomasz inhaled deeply and closed his eyes for a second before opening them again, pain written deeply into his face. "I know," he said. "I was hoping you did too."

"How many will stay?"

"I will. Ganak, Torinn and Kan'dret will too. You have our word on that. As for the rest... probably no more than ten or fifteen. Money is everything."

"All four of you?"

"Our allegiance is to you," Tomasz said firmly. "To you, to the Shadows... to Nelog."

"I wonder what my father would say of all this," Thralog mused.

"It'd probably be pretty colourful," Tomasz said, grinning ruefully. "God, I miss him."

"Me too," Thralog said quietly. "But that can't change what we know. The Shadows are done."

"We can rebuild. Go somewhere else on the station, take over an independent district or something. Your father did the same thing fifteen years ago. But our position here is fatally damaged."

"I want to delay it as long as possible," Thralog said. "We've got every information dealer in the district working for us, at least until the money runs out. I'm not leaving if we still have a chance at taking down the motherfuckers who did this to us."

"With you," Tomasz said instantly. "But if we don't-"

"Then we leave. Start over," Thralog said, and suddenly there was a tiny flicker of hope in him. _If the inner circle is willing to stay... then there's a future. Not a great one, but a future is a future. On Omega, you can't ask for much more. _"Until then, we cease all operations. Strip the last lab and bring the stuff back here, and bring in every member we have left to central command. Need-to-know is over. Everyone comes here, and then we wait. They might get cocky. We need all our forces under direct control."

"Your father had a similar plan for an event like this," Tomasz said. "I don't know if he told you. I think he was alive in his version, but-"

"Contingency One," Thralog said, nodding. "I knew about it, yeah. That's what I'm basing it on."

"Even in death, he's still the boss," Tomasz said, with the ghost of a smile. "He was a good man."

_Liar._

"Get the word out, Tom. We might still have a chance for a little payback."

"On it, boss," Tomasz said, and left. Thralog stayed standing for a few seconds as the big man's heavy footsteps echoed down the stairs, then he went back over to the bed and sat down again. He was still alone, but it didn't feel quite so bad any more.


	24. Sanctuary: Spinning Webs

**SANCTUARY**

**TWO: SPINNING WEBS

* * *

**

In the end, it took a few hours before Sensat called. Garrus had changed out of his heavy armour and had waited for two of them before eventually dozing off on his couch. He didn't like to admit it to himself, but he'd been worried. Melenis and Sensat could take care of themselves easily enough, he knew that from personal experience, but the wait just seemed to keep dragging out, winding up a tight coil of anxiety in the pit of his stomach. He'd insisted to himself that it was a stupid thing to worry about, but that didn't really solve anything; he still found himself pacing up and down his tiny, sparse living room until the weight of his eyelids became just too heavy to bear and he'd sat down to rest for a few minutes, promising himself it would be that and no more. A couple of hours later, he jerked suddenly awake as his terminal bleeped loudly in the corner of his room, informing him that there was a call for him.

He quickly crossed over to it, shaking the little sleep he'd managed to get from his head, and opened up the line. Sensat's face appeared on the screen, as ugly as ever. _Not that I could reasonably expect him to feel differently about me._

"Ah, you're awake," Sensat said.

"Well, _now_, yes," Garrus said, rubbing his eyes.

"Did you succeed?"

"Yeah. We got seven of them."

"So noted," Sensat said. "That's a good night."

"Yeah," Garrus repeated. "How about you two? You don't look very dead, so I'm assuming it went well."

"Better than well, as a matter of fact," the batarian rasped. "We've acquired some very interesting information. Should we start a conference call? It needs discussion."

Garrus considered it for a moment. "How urgent is this?"

"We can act on it whenever we like. It might be prudent to wait some time before we move, in fact. We can meet at the Spider Bar later today if that's better."

_Well, I do need the sleep..._

"We'll do that," Garrus said, nodding. "Say, 1730, so we can blend in with the after-work crowd?"

"Agreed," Sensat said, and moved to cut the call. Garrus quickly held up a hand to stop him.

"One question," he said, and Sensat cocked his head. "What exactly have you found?"

A vicious grin slowly spread across Sensat's face. "Their last sanctuary."

The call cut out.

Garrus stayed standing at the terminal for a second, staring out of the narrow window above it in thought. His view wasn't great, just showing yet another orange-tinted, shadowy Omega street, but it was better than nothing.

_So, they've discovered their base? Maybe we'll actually have a chance to put an end to them once and for all._

_And what then? How do we stop the Blue Suns from just taking over their operation? We can't go up against the Suns, we just don't have the numbers. We're better than them, but quantity can outweigh quality._

_So what do we achieve? We strengthen the bigger gangs. Even if we put a permanent stop to the Shadows, what have we done but opened a door to someone else? You can't change that, that's just how Omega is. You can't drain an abscess when there's nothing left _but_ the abscess._

…

_But that's not enough to stop me. It's early days yet. Never know what the future holds. And nobody ever said it was going to be easy. Nothing ever is._

Barely encouraged, he stepped away from the terminal and, stripping off his shirt as he walked, he headed to his cramped bedroom and collapsed on the bunk almost as soon as he'd folded it down from the wall. He was asleep again within a minute.

* * *

"_Hopeful inquiry: Ooh, baby, do you know what that's worth-"_

Garrus had seen more than his fair share of horrible things over his lifetime. Working as a C-Sec Investigator had accounted for a lot of them. The Wards were strange, strange places sometimes, and the crime tended to become more and more weird and disturbing the deeper you went into their darker elements. He remembered black-market organ deals in nightmarish underground laboratories, dens of nutjobs sandblasted past the point where anyone could ever safely go, the rotting flesh literally starting to drop from their emaciated bodies, that gang of human murderers and rapists who only ever targeted the Citadel's few female quarians, and even that odd case of indecent exposure from a volus. What he was seeing right now was worse than all of it.

The Spider Bar was, to be charitable, an odd joint. That was why they'd chosen it as their usual meeting place, actually. Erash had known it and recommended it to them, and it had sounded pretty attractive from his description: secluded, occupied by a rainbow spectrum of races, and generally considered a weird place for misfits and losers. That hadn't sounded bad at all.

Of course, since he'd been there last, the human owners had installed a karaoke machine. Ostensibly, it contained a selection of classics from every race's musical repertoire, from old favourites of turian march-rock to modern asari glidecore. _You wouldn't know that if you'd only heard it,_ Garrus thought moodily, staring down into his drink. Nobody ever touched the thing except an endless stream of elcor, and to make matters worse, their collective tastes seemed only to extend to a few decades of centuries-old human music.

The Spider Bar was owned by a couple of human guys, Yuri and Karl, who spent most of their time behind the old-style wooden bar in the centre of the room. The fact that the joint was human-owned meant that there were almost as many humans as there were elcor milling around the smoky room, although there were still a few dozen representatives from various other races – and bizarrely, most of them seemed to be wearing some kind of piece of stereotypical human clothing, such as their blue denim leggings or peaked caps. Garrus had absolutely no idea why, but it seemed to fit with the bar's quirky, human-dominated aesthetic.

It was roughly an equal split between the three groups, and with a third of those being elcor, the bar was packed. Garrus had had enough foresight to reserve one of the private booths off to the side of the main area of the bar a few hours before the place started to fill up, but it was still open onto the smoky, hot general floor – and the singing was inescapable wherever you went. He sat and drank while two-hundred year old human pop meandered its way out of elcor lungs and asari in cocktail dresses danced with salarians in leather jackets, filled with a general sense that the universe was being vexingly passive-aggressive towards him of late.

"_Uplifting exhortation: Don't stop believing-"_

_This,_ Garrus told himself, _must be what hell is like._

Not even the drinks were any good. There were probably only about eight dextro drinkers in the whole bar, so all the owners ever bothered to stock was a few basic turian drinks. _And we can't make drinks. Everyone knows the quarians are better._

He sighed and flicked his eyes through the options on his visor, starting up some of his own music to drown out the horrific elcor singing, then sat back to wait for the others.

Erash was the first to arrive, wearing some sort of bizarre orange shirt with green floral prints on it. He was visible through the smoke and the crowd almost immediately despite the range of colours, and Garrus raised an eyebrow as he slid into the seat opposite him.

"Please tell me you've had a stroke or something and that you don't genuinely think that looks good," he said, without much hope.

"You're not getting into the spirit of things at all, are you?" Erash said, smiling. He nodded to the crowd. "Most of the people here are wearing some sort of human clothing. It's like a tradition here."

"Is that really human clothing?" Garrus said curiously. "I've never seen any of them wearing _that_."

Erash shrugged. "The extranet says it is. You don't like it?"

"No."

"You're no fun, you know that?"

"No."

Sidonis and Melenis arrived at the same time, apparently having met each other outside the bar. Melenis had dropped his old red suit in favour of a more generic dark one so that he could more easily blend into Omega's volus population, and there was certainly nothing in the way he looked or walked now that tipped you off about the power beneath it all. There was less of that these days as well; Sensat had been forced to cannibalise certain parts in order to repair the damage effectively, and as a result Melenis's legs could no longer extend as much as they had been able to. He still packed about as much punch as a krogan, but he could barely keep pace with a fairly hard run now. He'd taken it fairly philosophically, all things considered, but Garrus couldn't help but feel a twinge of guilt every time he saw him waddling like a biological volus, especially when his own leg had healed perfectly.

Sidonis, mercifully, had also foregone the bar's so-called tradition, instead opting for a bland blue tunic. They'd met at the Spider Bar a few times before, but Sidonis still looked just as bemused as ever at its strange atmosphere.

"_Defiant: As we make our stand, down in Jungleland-"_

"Why do elcor think they can sing?" he said, sliding in next to Garrus. "Why?"

"I suspect," Melenis said, "that if we knew the answer to that, we might understand a great deal more about the nature of the universe."

"That sounded suspiciously like a joke, Mel," Erash said severely.

"My apologies," Melenis said, and hoisted himself up onto the bench next to the salarian. "It will not happen again."

Over the past few weeks, Garrus had learned somewhat to read Melenis's seemingly bland voice. Without being able to see his face or even his eyes, it was damned difficult to work out the emotional tone behind most of what he said – especially since there quite often wasn't one – but he was starting to suspect that the volus's mask and serious demeanour concealed a remarkably dry sense of humour. It didn't turn up often, but he was almost certain it was still there.

"So, just Sensat we're waiting on?" Sidonis said. "Figures. Guy can't keep a schedule for his- what the fuck are you wearing?"

"Who, me?" Erash said.

"Do you see anyone else I might say that to?"

"It's a human Hawaiian shirt," Erash said defensively. "What's wrong with it?"

"Man, I know salarians have a bad sense of fashion, but this is ridiculous," Sidonis said, and got up again. "I need alcohol to function. Anyone else?"

"I'm good," Garrus said, eyeing his still half-full beer. "Well, I say 'good'..."

"I could go for a Krong," Erash said.

"What, that batarian rotgut?" Sidonis said, raising an eyebrow. "Your funeral. Melenis?"

"I don't have a digestive system," Melenis said.

Sidonis nodded thoughtfully. "Yes, I can see how that might be a problem."

"It's not a problem. I can remotely infuse various chemicals into my bloodstream, perfectly replicating the experience of any drug at a fraction of the cost."

"Uh, good," Sidonis said, and disappeared through the crowd towards the bar.

"Can you really do that?" Garrus said, interested.

Melenis nodded. "Yes. The system's intent was primarily medical, but it can be used in multiple ways."

"Bastard can recover from a hangover in five seconds," Erash said sourly.

"To be more accurate, I can avoid the hangover entirely."

"Good for you."

"I feel like I find out something new about that body of yours every day," Garrus said appreciatively. "It's a hell of a piece of engineering."

"You have already seen what happens when Sensat is given practically unlimited funds and told to create things," Melenis said. "My body is simply an extension of that. He did not create it for me; he created it for himself. I just happened to benefit from it."

"What would have happened if you hadn't?" Garrus asked.

"I would have died," Melenis said, with terse finality. He'd let a certain edge creep into his voice with that last sentence, a clear warning sign that the question was verging on forbidden waters. Garrus didn't like it, but he stowed away his curiosity for the moment. _If he doesn't want to talk about it, I'm not going to drag it out of him._

They sat in a slightly awkward silence for a while, and Garrus found himself staring out across the bar, past the crowds and towards the more open section at one end that was packed with nothing but elcor. They were arranged in a loose semicircle, all facing in on a small stage decorated with a few token lights and mostly occupied by an elcor, a karaoke machine, and a microphone. _On their own, three fairly innocuous things. Combined together, they're some kind of war crime._

"_Impassioned existential angst: It's the terror of knowing what this world is about-_"

He shuddered and turned away just in time to catch sight of Sensat weaving through the crowd towards them. He caught the batarian's eye and raised his beer in greeting. Sensat nodded curtly as he approached, then took a seat as he emerged from the crowd again and entered the booth.

"Evening," Erash said.

Sensat regarded him curiously for a second. "Yes. It is."

"I... you know what, never mind," Erash said. "Where's Sidonis with those drinks? I need to impair my mental functions as quickly as possible."

"A noble goal," Garrus said, and drained the rest of his glass in one. It didn't help much; the music was still there and he didn't feel nearly drunk enough to stop hating it.

Sidonis pushed his way through the crowd a few seconds later with two sealed glasses. He slid one down the table to Erash before cracking open his own and sitting down again.

"All present and mostly correct, then?" he said.

"Looks like it," Garrus said, and turned to Sensat. "This had better be good info. I've been here half an hour and I've heard _Dancing Queen _three times."

"Ouch," Erash said sympathetically.

"I like that one," Sensat said. "It has a good chorus. There was a particularly good version a few nights back, actually."

Garrus stared at him in disbelief.

"What?" Sensat said defensively, looking around at the accusing faces. "You don't like it?"

"How can you even tell apart elcor singers?" Erash said, frowning.

"By their use of emotional qualifiers," Sensat answered. "Every elcor interprets a song in a slightly different way and would apply a different emotional tone to the song."

"Wait, we haven't been here for over a week," Sidonis said. "Did you come here on your own?"

"Yes."

"...still not drunk enough," Sidonis said, and gulped down half of his drink in one mouthful. "Please, just get it over with."

"Indeed," Garrus said. "What's casting these Shadows?"

"I see what you did there," Sidonis murmured.

"I prepared this to help," Sensat said, and called up his omnitool. A couple of strokes activated a program, and then a holographic map of the mazy, illogical streets of an Omega district appeared on the table in the usual orange. Garrus couldn't tell which one it was by sight; a lot of districts looked more or less the same from the air, after all, and there weren't any obvious distinguishing features.

"Kima District," Sensat went on, answering the question nobody had asked, "with some of Roki and Goku at the sides. Of course, there weren't many possible hiding places to choose from. However, it seems the situation has changed somewhat."

"How so?" Garrus asked.

"Melenis and I were staking out the drug lab we took three days ago." Sensat tapped a control, and a building in what looked like the very edge of Roki district lit up in green. "We didn't expect much, in all honesty. There were a few terminals left that we hadn't cracked yet, but there wasn't anything of particular interest. No useful pointers to their base and no operational plans: just a few personal messages, games, and so on. About the same time, you were hitting that patrol in the north. We finished up there and took up watch positions to see if anyone came by in response, but they took a different route. Then, we had our breakthrough."

"I had been running several systems on a general radio trace for days," Melenis said. "They switch their codes and frequency every time we hit them, which is good operational protocol. It stops their communications from being compromised. However, this time, I was able to break the encryption and listen in from a wide-net recovery channel centred over the location we knew you had hit them at."

"Is that supposed to make sense?" Sidonis said.

"We were listening in," Sensat clarified.

"You could have just said so."

"And they revealed the location of their base live on comm channels?" Garrus said sceptically. "Even for the Shadows, that's poor protocol. They're usually careful."

"They were," Melenis replied. "As Sensat said, the situation has changed. We intercepted communications indicating that a general retreat had been ordered."

That sent a quiet wave of elation through the booth. That was the best news they'd had all week: it meant that they weren't just making an impact, but had damaged the Shadows so badly that they

"were abandoning their present operations just to cut their losses. _But that's just the good news: it also means they'll fortify their central command. We can wait them out, but they can always leave and start again in some other district, and the cancer won't die if we let any of them live._

"They used codewords and didn't say much even then," Sensat said, "but they were in contact across the district. We didn't manage to listen in on every comm channel they were using, but we were in the loop. That meant we had multiple groups all in contact with their headquarters, and _that_ meant we could take an estimate of the signal strength in each direction and work out where the lines of communication converged. That was here-"

He entered another command, and a flashing white ring appeared on the map. A miniature key to one side indicated the scale; it looked like it was about a hundred metres or so across. Looking at it, there was only one building which was entirely within the circle: a fairly large rectangular structure that looked like it might have been a small apartment building or something, fronted by a long bridge connecting it to the rest of the district. _Damn good place to stick your headquarters. That means you've got fifty metres' warning on anyone approaching from the front, and if they try you can snipe them no problem._

"-and that building is the only possible source," Melenis finished. Sensat nodded and tapped one more button, dyeing the shape of the building bright red.

"So we know where they are," Erash said thoughtfully, leaning back and folding his arms. "Interesting... but problematic."

"It'd be difficult in normal circumstances," Sensat said. "However, as we said, they seem to have ordered a retreat. That means every single one of them will be holed up in that building, and they're smart enough to fortify."

"Alternate routes in?" Garrus said, peering closely at the building.

"The records I've found so far say it's a repurposed apartment complex, about a hundred years old or so. That bridge is the main entrance, but there's a basement level. It'll be connected by tunnels, old passageways, and so on. The problem is finding them – and even if we find them, we're still heavily outnumbered and in a very bad position. They might even be blocked."

"So that's not an option?"

Sensat shook his head. "Not a sensible one."

"Aircar access, maybe?" Garrus offered. "If it was residential once, then there has to be some kind of garage."

"A strong possibility," Sensat said. "However-"

"-same problems," Garrus said. "There's a very good chance they'll shoot us down if we try that way, and it's damn hard to make an undetected approach with the amount of traffic Omega usually has. Even if we got in, we're on their turf and outgunned. And, uh, I don't think we actually own a car."

"Also a valid concern," Sensat said seriously.

"So... what?" Sidonis asked. "Anything else?"

"Rappelling down the side of the building?" Erash said. "It's possible. I've done it before."

"Oh, yeah," Sidonis said sarcastically. "Let's dangle in front of a fucking window on ropes. Not like that's going to make us target practice or anything. We're not special forces, man."

"Just a suggestion," Erash said, raising his hands. "I don't suppose you've got any better ideas?"

"Yes!" Sidonis snapped. "How about 'not attacking them'? We've won already! There's no way they can salvage their op now!"

"True," Garrus said, "but that doesn't mean they can't start again. This operation is dead in the water, but this is Omega. The leaders are still alive. If we let them get out, we might as well be handing them a loan and office space so they can just do the same thing somewhere else."

"Yeah. This _is_ Omega," Sidonis said sourly. "This kind of shit happens. Stopping a few gang leaders versus all our lives? Heavy risk, but the prize ain't worth it."

"If we stop now, what have we accomplished?" Sensat said quietly, barely audible over the noise of the crowd and the music.

"We brought down a gang," Sidonis said.

"And then what?" Garrus said, fixing his eyes on Sidonis. "What do you think will happen then? Do we personally police the districts they controlled?"

"Sure, why not?"

Garuus sighed and held up a hand, ticking off fingers as he went. "We'd need more men to do that, so we'd recruit – and this is Omega. To get any reasonable numbers, we couldn't be picky. We'd need money to pay them, so we'd either have to take protection creds from the people or sell something – arms, drugs, whatever. We'd have to fight off rival gangs who want in on our territory – and then we realise that we're thinking of it as 'territory'. What does that sound like to you?"

"We wouldn't be a gang," Sidonis insisted. "We'd just-"

"-do everything they do. The only difference is that we'd have kidded ourselves into thinking we're doing the right thing."

"He who fights monsters..." Melenis murmured.

"We could do so much more if we weren't just five guys sitting in a bar," Sidonis said.

Garrus slammed a hand palm-down on the table, shaking the glasses. The others looked up at him in surprise, and he carefully kept his own surprise at what he'd done from his face.

"No," he said, once he was sure he had their undivided attention. "We do _not_ compromise our ideals, _ever_. You do it once, you'll do it again, and you'll keep on doing it until you've lost sight of what you are. These gangs are the cancer on Omega, and we're the cure. I'm not letting them corrupt us."

"A cure's no use unless you spread it," Sidonis said, but he didn't sound as sure of himself as he had a few seconds earlier.

"Agreed, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. I will not tolerate anyone who thinks that just because a gang does it, we can do it too. We play by our own rules. Clear?"

"...clear," Sidonis said, and broke his gaze from Garrus's eyes. "Yeah. Clear."

"...so, we need to work out some way of attacking that place," Garrus said, determined to move back onto the task at hand. "Front's out. Back's out. Air's out. Top's out. What's left?"

"Bomb," Erash said. "I'd need creds and time, but I could build something big enough to level the building."

"How much of each?"

"Uh, fifty grand and a week?" Erash said hopefully

The silence spoke volumes.

"Well, just an idea," the salarian said, shrugging. "Batarians are supposed to be experts at this sort of blowing-inhabited-buildings-up thing. Any ideas, Sensat?"

"I find that stereotype offensive," Sensat said. "Even though it's mostly true. In any case, I'm a technician, an engineer and a scientist, not a terrorist."

"Nobody here does what they're supposed to," Erash complained. "We've got a couple of dropout turians, a batarian scientific prodigy and a goddamn superpowered volus. You guys suck at being normal."

"Motley crews are always better," Garrus said sagely, as another elcor sauntered to the microphone and began to sing. "Well-known fact of life."

"_With manic excitement: When I get high, I get high on speed-"_

"Ah, if only we had a few krogan," Erash said, shaking his head. "Actually, do you think we could just hire the Blood Pack to storm the base for us?"

"Tempting," Garrus said, "but no. That complicates matters far too much. The Blood Pack are greedy. They'd probably just betray us."

"If we can't have help, then we can't win. Simple as."

"Not necessarily," Melenis said suddenly, as if he'd just thought of something. "Our problem is that they have by far the superior position. What if we were to remove that advantage, and instead take it for ourselves?"

"Yeah, that's not actually a plan, Mel," Erash said. "Care to add a little detail?"

"If we can lure them out of their base, then we could occupy it and be ready for their return," Melenis said. "All we need is something which could make them come out of hiding."

"Yeah?" Sidonis said. "Like what?"

"Like us," the volus said simply. "We could leak our supposed location to them. There is at least a reasonable chance that they would react by attempting to crush us with everything they have before we can do any further damage, or even simply for revenge. While they're on their pointless chase, we could take over their headquarters and be ready to eliminate them as they return."

There was a pause of a few seconds as they considered it, broken only by the elcor crooning in the background.

"I like it," Garrus said eventually. "It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot safer than just walking in the front door."

"If we can get it to work," Erash said. "If we can convince them they can find us. If they choose to act on the tip. Big ifs."

"And that still leaves the problem of defending the building when they come back," Garrus mused. "It'll be easier if we control that end of the bridge, but that doesn't mean it's going to actually be _easy_."

"There's also a risk that they might simply leave if they realised we controlled their base," Sensat said. "Then we wouldn't gain anything."

"We'd get their base," Sidonis said. "That's something. Don't know about you guys, but my apartment isn't exactly luxury."

"Real estate concerns should perhaps be set aside for the moment," Melenis said drily. "The essence of the problem is this: by doing this, we put ourselves in danger, but also give ourselves a chance to put a definitive end to the Shadows – a chance we would not have otherwise. Is it worth it?"

"...I think so," Garrus said after a couple of seconds. He looked around at the men clustered around the table, and got four attentive stares back. Sidonis still looked slightly sullen, but Garrus was sure that wouldn't affect his judgement; Melenis was as impassive as ever, while Erash looked relaxed and contemplative. Sensat was wound tighter, his head constantly bobbing almost imperceptibly from side to side; there was some anxiety under there, but Garrus couldn't gauge how much. The batarian had been going out of his way to be polite and respectful to him – _and me alone, guy still ignores Sidonis most of the time_ – since they'd landed on Omega, and he was almost sure he actually meant it... _but trust doesn't come easily, does it? Not when I've destroyed your life's work, and definitely not when that 'life's work' was a doomsday machine. And there's something else... when we were going after Deus, he was driven by hatred, pride, anger. That all died with Golf, and now I'm not sure what he wants. I don't think he is, either. When it comes down to it, I'm not sure any of us are._

"It's your call," Sensat said, tilting his head left a little. "If you think-"

"No," Garrus said, and Sensat fell silent immediately. "We'll vote. All in favour?"

He raised his own hand, and Sensat and Melenis joined him almost simultaneously. Erash's came up half a second later, and Sidonis's a full second after that.

_Interesting._

He'd known he'd win the vote, that much had been obvious, but he'd been watching their reactions. He'd seen more or less what he'd expected – blind loyalty from Sensat, decisiveness from Melenis, languid thoughtfulness from Erash and a hint of reluctance from Sidonis. The latter was what worried him slightly, but it wasn't anywhere near a problem yet. _And it's always good to have debate, as long as it doesn't compromise unity. Something to keep in mind, certainly._

"Ah, the sweet smell of democratic legitimacy," Erash intoned solemnly. "Looks like we've got ourselves a plan."

"We still haven't got the specifics down," Garrus said, and turned to Melenis. "What exactly did you have in mind? It's not as if we can just have one of us walk in through the front door and tip them off."

"Why not?" Melenis said. "We will go through middle-men so that it doesn't seem too suspicious, but the informant will be taken to their base as long as we are careful to observe one fundamental rule."

"And that is?"

"I believe you fell into exactly the same trap when we first met," Melenis said. "After all, nobody ever suspects the volus."


	25. Sanctuary: Losing Battles

**SANCTUARY**

**THREE: LOSING BATTLES

* * *

**

Thralog Mirki'it ran a hand down his face and yawned widely. He'd at least managed to snatch a couple of hours of sleep while the orders filtered out and the surviving Shadows started to file back into headquarters, but that had been well over twelve hours ago and he was still feeling as weary as ever. It was a real fight to keep his eyes open even with the general hubbub in the communal ground floor of the base. He'd lived here most of his life, after all. He was used to it.

They'd done better than he'd expected, actually; the Shadows still numbered over forty even after the deaths and desertions, although he had no doubt that that number would fall once the street boys realised the seriousness of the situation. He hadn't suffered many desertions yet, though, and that was enough to inspire some confidence, as was the comforting murmur of dozens of people swarming around the building. _We haven't lost everything yet. Just most of it._

Their base had never seen this level of activity – or, at least, not in over a decade. He vaguely recalled it being packed like this years before, when they'd fought a short, brutal war against an upstart human gang looking to take over their trade, but that was a distant memory now. All he could call up clearly was an image of his father and his lieutenants clustered around the briefing table he'd kept until a few years ago, so deep in planning that he hadn't dared even trying to talk to them. He'd been... what, sixteen? Seventeen? He'd wanted to fight, but he'd known his father would never allow that. That hadn't stopped him from taking a rifle out of storage and taking his car to a rooftop overlooking Hacre Street, but what had happened after that was a blur. He was fairly sure he'd dropped a few of the encroaching Red Rebels, as the humans had styled themselves, but adrenalin had wiped his memory of the night pretty much clean. _And dad knew, of course. I was amazed how loudly he could shout with a bullet in his lung._

Tomasz was speaking to someone over his comm set as he came down the stairs to the right, but he finished by the time he was at the bottom and shouldered past a few jumpy-looking street dealers to get to the couch Thralog was sitting on.

"That was Third, boss," he said, lowering his heavy frame onto another seat. "They're coming around via Irden to stay low-profile. Should be here in about ten minutes. The equipment just arrived by car, all accounted for. Produce too."

Thralog nodded approvingly. Third was the last surviving drug lab the Shadows had operated; the first two had gone down days ago, but as long as they'd rescued the product and the equipment from Third then they hadn't lost everything. They'd deliberately left it as the last thing they would withdraw; there'd been disagreement, but Thralog had been adamant that pushing the lab into production overdrive while everyone else retreated would pay off.

"How much do we have?" he asked.

"About a kilo pure, three more at around 65%," Tomasz said. "Street value of eighty, ninety grand. Maybe better if we use the pure to disguise the rest."

"Told you so."

Tomasz chuckled. "That you did. That produce could be invaluable later when we're looking for start-up capital."

"That's the idea. Is everything in place?"

"Everything."

"Good," Thralog said, rubbing his chin. "In that case, get the inner circle together and clear the second level. We need to talk."

* * *

"I don't think I need to summarise the situation here," Thralog said, "or what it means for us. Do I?"

A mute chorus of shaken heads was the only response. Thralog nodded, and leaned out over the ledge looking over the bridge. It was coming up to 2200 by Omega's day cycle, but the light level never changed from that familiar orange-tinted twilight. He'd never left the station to see anything different, and that gloom so many first-time visitors found oppressive or menacing was comforting to him, a reassurance that no matter the particulars of the politics and the infighting on Omega, the station itself never changed. _For better or for worse._

"I know how much I hate doing this," he said, not looking back. "It's probably worse for you. There's a temptation to think that we're strong enough to withstand this, that we're being cowards by shutting down. We're not. Our position is already untenable. The only question is how we proceed now."

"It took Nelog fifteen years to get the Shadows to where they are today," Ganak said. "If we start over, it'll be years before we're anywhere near as strong as we are now."

"We're not strong now," Torinn muttered. "Not any more. How long do you think it'll be before we can't pay people? Most of the street kids are just that: street kids. They'll go running to whoever'll take 'em in. They don't give a fuck about the Shadows. They just want their money."

"We could have kept it to one lab in operation," Ganak snapped, all four of his eyes blazing. _Angry, but not with Torinn. With the situation. With himself?_ "We could have guarded it heavily, put all our tech boys there. That would be enough to keep us going for a month or so if we had it at high production. That's plenty of time to hunt the sons of bitches who're doing this down."

"Wrong," Thralog said, turning to face the four men gathered behind him. Ganak looked at him with a carefully blank face. "Have you been paying attention to the way they've been doing it? Whoever's after us is professional. This isn't some two-bit gang or some nutjob vigilante. I don't know who it is, but they're military in their precision. Omega is the hardest place in the galaxy to hunt anyone down on, let alone someone like that. I will not risk the future of this organisation without something solid to go on, and I will not allow unnecessary harm to come to its members. We look after our own, Ganak."

There was a long, tense pause as he and Ganak locked eyes. He'd expected some resistance from him; Ganak had always been the most intransigent of his father's lieutenants aside from Milner - but Milner had taken a round through the head ten days ago, and now Ganak was taking over his position as the most hawkish member of the inner circle at the heart of the Shadows. Thralog knew him well enough to see he wouldn't push it, however, and he was proven right when Ganak dropped his gaze and nodded in acquiescence.

"Right, boss," he said. Thralog nodded again and left it at that. Whatever doubts he might harbour, Ganak was as loyal as they came, and he'd be with him until the end. That much, at least, was certain. Thinking that any of his lieutenants might have actually opposed him suddenly seemed laughable, but he was all too aware that he'd been thinking exactly that until Tomasz had spoken to him in the early hours of the morning.

The atmosphere relaxed a little from the powerful tension that had been there since they'd gathered on the upper level once the inevitable confrontation had been dealt with, and Thralog stepped away from the ledge to confirm it, moving to the seats placed near the racks of bunks to signal a more casual session instead of the formality that standing implied. He waited until they'd all taken a seat before continuing.

"I believe," he said, with a thin smile, "that we just covered the basics, yes?"

That got a few pained smiles and forced chuckles, not from them humouring him but from a collective desire to loosen the atmosphere a little further. Even Ganak managed a smile.

"Right," Thralog said, and leaned forward. "We have no choice but to suspend operations in our territory, we all know that. If we don't, we'll continue taking losses until we won't be able to salvage anything from this whole fucking mess. If we try to wait it out, all indications are that people who are this kind of professional will hit us again as soon as we set up, and that's not including the Suns, who are entirely willing to fuck us at the first opportunity. We can't stay here. We're leaving the district."

"How has it come to this?" Kan'dret burst out. "We've been careful, more careful than we had to be! We didn't make enemies, we paid our dues to Aria, we kept price gouging to a reasonable level! What the hell _is_ this shit?"

"Cool it," Tomasz grunted. "Nothing we can do to change it now."

"Indeed," Thralog said. "We haven't informed the men that we're pulling out completely yet, but I imagine most of them have worked it out by now. We have perhaps a hundred thousand credits of working capital and the equipment from Third. We need to locate a target district to take over, work out a timetable and logistics, and then move within three days."

"Three days is not a long time," Torinn said doubtfully.

"Exactly. If we move quickly we can stem the flow of desertions before it reaches its peak."

"True enough," Torinn said, nodding slowly, "but do we have the capacity to pull this off? We'd need to isolate a district with both a viable market and penetrable defences, as well as ID'ing enemy strength, strongholds, the general mood in the area..."

"Our scouts can do all of that," Tomasz said. "Plus we have contacts who owe favours to us. It's possible."

"But three days is a difficult timeframe," Thralog mused. "I understand that, don't get me wrong, and it's definitely not a concrete deadline, but the longer we delay..."

He left the sentence hanging there, half threat and half warning. It got a contemplative silence of a few seconds, with nothing but the low-level ambient hum of Omega's ageing systems drifting in through the window and the murmur of conversation from downstairs. Thralog could almost convince himself it was like any normal night at Shadows HQ.

"What do we tell them?" Ganak said, in a low, quiet voice. "Anything? Everything?"

"...Tomasz, take the techies and anyone above street," Thralog said. "The people who comprise the inner workings of the organisation. Tell them the situation. In full. Make it clear to them that they're needed. Invoke my father if you want. They'll leak it to the rank and file, and most of them will vanish. If we can keep ten or fifteen, including the tech boys and a few veterans, then we have a platform to build on. We'll keep the core."

"Fifteen fucking years down the drain," Kan'dret snarled, and slammed a hand down onto the arm of his couch. "For what? What have we gained? We don't _deserve_ this!"

"We're still alive," Thralog said. "That's more than can be said for a lot of good people. We can save the Shadows as an entity. We can carry on. None of this is about what we deserve, or what we're owed, or what we have a right to. This is Omega. Take what you can and be thankful that you've got that much."

"This is no way to fight a war," Kan'dret said more calmly, but his fingers tightening on the fabric beneath them betrayed the fire he was barely keeping in check. _Anger won't help us now, my friend,_ Thralog thought. "Give us an enemy you can see and we'd have ripped them to shreds days ago. These people are fucking cowards. Is there really no way we can beat them?"

"Doesn't seem like it," Torinn said morosely.

"I disagree," Tomasz said, and sixteen eyes flicked his way. "I've been asking myself one question over the last couple of weeks: why? This is not the action of a rival gang. The only ones who would benefit from this are the Blue Suns, and even they would only gain a little. There has to be some kind of external reason for this."

"Like what?" Ganak said. "Law enforcement moving in on Omega? They've learned well enough that's a bad idea."

"True," Tomasz said. "It has to be smaller than that."

"Vigilantes?" Torinn said, frowning. "I thought it might be something like that, but why us?"

"Luck, most likely," Tomasz answered, "but that's not important. Their motive is some sort of misguided do-gooder bullshit, the way I see it. That means that they only win if we're all dead. If the Shadows stay alive, then we've won. We've beaten them." He looked around expectantly at the others' faces. "Don't you see? As long as the Shadows live on, they haven't done what they set out to do. The best thing we can possibly do now is get out as fast as we can."

"There is... a certain logic to it," Kan'dret said after a pause, although he still looked distinctly uneasy. "And we have very few other options."

"I would go as far as to say 'no other options'," Thralog murmured. "Thank you, Tom. Well put. Start getting the word out to essential personnel."

"On it," Tomasz said at once, and hauled himself up to disappear downstairs.

"Kan'dret, work on security arrangements: bodyguards, weapons, armour, that sort of thing," Thralog went on, even before Tomasz had left the room. "We need to be well-equipped when we leave. Torinn, Ganak: get Brian and the other scouts and start on deciding where we go. Officially, tell them we're looking to expand our operation. They'll know it's lies, but tell them anyway. I want this done quickly, people. This is the most important operation in the history of the Shadows. We do it right, or we lose everything. Clear?"

"Clear," Ganak said, and Torinn and Kan'dret nodded along with him. The three rose at Thralog's return of the nod and headed downstairs, Ganak and Torinn already in close conversation. Thralog waited until they'd all gone before he got up himself and wandered back to the viewpoint overlooking the bridge. He rested his elbows on the ledge and closed his eyes.

_And just like that, we're cutting and running. What more can we do? Against an invisible enemy, it doesn't matter how strong you are. The only way to win is to make them visible. If you can see them, you can kill them. We can't, and that's that. It's not fair, but Omega never was._

He stayed standing there for five minutes or so, taking in the familiar shadowy recesses of the vast building blocks of the station. _Won't be able to enjoy this view for much longer... ah, that's a point. We'll have to blow this place up behind us. It's far too good a position to let the Suns have it free. We'll make the bastards pay for it. Maybe we could even wire it to blow when they arrive. That would serve them right-_

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the door sliding open behind him, and he turned to see Tomasz coming back into the room.

Thralog raised an eyebrow. "That was fast," he began, but Tomasz cut him off.

"Sorry, boss, but you really need to hear this," the human said breathlessly. "It's Jiger Toerun, usual channel."

Thralog opened up his omnitool without hesitation and opened a call to Toerun. If Tomasz thought something was urgent enough to actually interrupt him, then Thralog knew that it was damn well urgent.

"Toerun?" he said. "What is it?"

"Ah, Thralog. I was so sorry to hear about your father."

_No you weren't, you little shit._

"As was I," Thralog said coldly. "What is it?"

"I've got something you're going to be very interested in," the salarian said, his voice almost dripping with avarice. Thralog grimaced a little at his nasally smug tone, but put it aside; Toerun was a jackass, nobody disputed that – but he was a hell of an information dealer, and _nobody_ disputed that.

"Like what?"

"Well, word's been out that you've been having a little... trouble of late," Toerun said, clearly enjoying the conversation. "It might just be that I've come into contact with someone who can pinpoint the source of this trouble for you."

Thralog's breath caught in his chest for a moment. _Does he mean-_

"He knows where they'll be and when, as well as who they are," the salarian said. "He has a recording. I've seen some of it. It checks out. There'll be a cost – to me, for bringing the matter to your attention, and to him, of course – but I'm sure that won't be an issue."

Thralog's throat was suddenly dry, and he swallowed. The last twenty seconds had sent his head spinning as he tried to work out the new parameters of the situation, and even now he couldn't quite believe what he was hearing. _Is it really that easy...?_

"How much?" he asked, although he didn't care. He let the salarian babble on about personal danger and difficult working conditions while he thought furiously about what to do. _The information may or may not be good, but I'm leaning towards 'may'. Toerun's too good to try and pass off bad intel, even knowing that we're falling apart. That means _he_ thinks it's solid, and he's never been wrong before... but what if it's a trap? They could have got to him and used him to try and lure us out into the open. It's too convenient._

…

_But if it's real..._

"-considered, my price is fifteen thousand," Toerun was saying as Thralog turned his attention back to the conversation. "Our... mutual friend has indicated he wants fifty thousand, as well as a guarantee of his personal safety."

"_Fifty thousand!_" Tomasz mouthed, looking disgusted. Thralog was inclined to agree; that would be a ridiculous price under almost any circumstances. _But extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures._

"We can meet those demands," Thralog said, putting an infinitesimal stress on the last word. _We can't, but fuck him if he thinks I'm actually paying him._ It was odd, he reflected, how calm he sounded compared to how he felt; his heart was beating away like a jackhammer in his chest, but his voice stayed absolutely level. "However, you must understand that for reasons related to operational security, we'll need to bring him to our headquarters."

"A moment," Toerun said, and muted the channel briefly before returning. "Yes, that's fine, as long as he can bring bodyguards."

"Of course," Thralog purred. _As if we're letting him leave here alive._ "I'll send a team in to pick him and his bodyguards up immediately, along with your payment. Where can we meet?"

"The roof of the Damma building, on Corroa Avenue. Debret district. One hour."

"I look forward to it."

"Fifteen thousand credits, remember," Toerun said, and ended the call.

There was a long moment of silence as Thralog and Tomasz stared at each other, Tomasz's hand still at his earpiece.

"That was... unexpected," Tomasz said finally, lowering his hand. "Think it's legit?"

"I don't know," Thralog replied. "But if it is and we pass on it, I'd spend the rest of my life knowing I might have missed the chance to deliver some richly-deserved payback on the bastards who killed my father. I can't let this go, Tom."

Tomasz grinned widely. "I can't tell you how much I was hoping you'd say that."

"This could be it," Thralog said. "This could be it!"

"We can't survive here even if we take them out," Tomasz said. "You understand that."

Thralog nodded slowly. "Yes, of course. But... this could be it, Tom."

"So you keep saying," Tomasz said solemnly. "Who leads the team out to pick him up?"

"Kan'dret," Thralog said instantly. "He can have everything he thinks he needs and more. I want this to go absolutely flawlessly. And... when they get there, have a small squad stay behind. If Toerun's present, I want him dead as soon as the package is secure."

"Dead?"

"Dead. We can't risk a double-cross. Also, I hate him and refuse to pay him."

"Fair enough," Tomasz said thoughtfully. "On that note, I assume we're not paying the contact either?"

"No, and I want his bodyguards killed as soon as they're inside the base- wait, no. Let him get close before we do it. Make sure the guy sees it. I want him scared out of his mind. I want him to think we're going to kill him if he doesn't deliver."

"And are we?"

"Yes."


	26. Sanctuary: Gaping Jaws

**SANCTUARY**

**FOUR: GAPING JAWS

* * *

**

_I wonder how much of my life has been spent staring down the sights of a gun? Too much, probably. Or too little. Definitely not exactly the right amount._

Garrus adjusted his sights slightly as the third and last of the skycars moved away from the roof of the Damma Building four hundred metres away, leaving tiny blue contrails shimmering in the twilight of Omega for a second before they evaporated away. He wasn't concerned with the cars, though; they were on their way to the Shadows' base, just as planned. They had time to work. Instead, he was watching the salarian standing on the rooftop with a trio of bodyguards, two turians and a krogan.

_I wonder if I could make the shot if I wanted to? I've made harder. Still..._

His body pinpointed by the twin green lines of Garrus's crosshair, the salarian turned and began to walk back towards the door down, looking at something on his omnitool as he went. _His payment, no doubt. The Shadows actually paid him. They're even more desperate than we thought._

When it came, the shot was barely audible, coming from well over six or seven hundred metres away on the other side of the Damma Building. Garrus heard it as a quiet _snap_, as if someone had gently flicked a snare drum with their finger, but he saw it as a sudden burst of light that penetrated the salarian's skull like a bolt of lightning, blowing away one of his horns and most of the side of his head in a grey-green burst. Toerun's body slumped to the ground even as his bodyguards looked around wildly for the attacker, one of the turians dropping to check the salarian's vitals in the desperate hope that he might not be dead. Garrus watched him dispassionately as he shouted something to the other two. A few seconds later, all three of them had disappeared from the roof, running like hell and leaving the body behind.

A quiet plastic tinkle on the roof next to Garrus made him look up to see an old, scratched red 50-credit chit lying on the metal.

"OK, fine, you were right," Sidonis said irritably. "Happy?"

"More or less," Garrus said, getting to his feet and pocketing the chit. "Never bet against the resourcefulness of crime on Omega. Might as well bet against the house in a volus casino."

"You kidding?" Erash said over the open radio channel they'd been running. "Salarian casinos put those volus fleahouses to shame. Just you try saying that in Union space. Ever heard of the Coeril?"

"Yes, I think I have a cream for that," Sidonis said drily.

"It's a casino on Gathath. Best fucking cheaters in the business. It came out a few years ago that their dealers had some kind of ultra-expensive black market omnitools that could fabricate new cards without tripping any sensors short of Spectre gear."

"So who found out?"

"Isn't it obvious? A Spectre. You'd be surprised how much time they spend in casinos."

"...no, I don't think I would," Garrus said, and returned his rifle to its compact configuration before slotting it onto the specially-designed groove on the back of his armour. "Melenis is away, and I was right. They killed the informant."

"Nice," Erash said admiringly. "Clean, slick, professional, ruthless. Good op these guys have."

"Not for much longer," Garrus said. "We're coming to meet you now. Everything looks good so far."

"There's still a lot to do," Sensat said, breaking into the line for the first time. "We cannot afford mistakes."

"Well, _we_ can," Garrus said. "Now, Melenis, on the other hand..."

* * *

Thralog felt a quiet pulse of excitement humming inside him as he watched the three skycars swoop into the garage of the Shadows' base, a sense that finally, after so much failure and defeat and disaster, something was going his way. Tomasz stood behind him as they waited for the vehicles to power down, and as the doors of the two outer cars swung up to reveal Kan'dret and his men, the big human leaned forwards to whisper in his ear.

"Everything's ready, boss," he murmured. "What signal will you give?"

"Oh, a snap of the fingers, I think," Thralog said quietly.

"Ah," Tomasz said, a smile in his voice. "I like to see an appreciation of the classics." He quickly brought his hand to his ear and muttered some instructions, but Thralog wasn't listening as the clam-shell doors of the central car swung up, and two beefy krogan clambered out. Their armour looked impressive from a distance, all gun-metal grey and pock-marked with battle scars, and their guns were big – but even from twenty metres away Thralog could tell they weren't well-trained. They didn't conduct more than a basic visual sweep of the area, and they'd both stepped forward before their employer left the car.

"Amateurs," Tomasz muttered behind him. "Hundred-cred job, max. Ridiculous."

Somehow, it didn't come as an enormous surprise to Thralog to see that the krogan were protecting – _although I doubt they'll get much done in that field tonight_ – a volus, who waddled around the front of the car and set off towards him, his bodyguards in tow as Kan'dret's men quickly filtered past to either disappear towards the main part of the base or take up positions behind Thralog. Kan'dret caught Thralog's eye as he moved in next to Tomasz, sending him a barely perceptible nod as he did so.

_Well, show time._

"Good-" Thralog began, stepping forward as the volus approached.

"I'm here for business," the volus said brusquely. "In and out. _(hkk) _As fast as possible. I trust you have _(hkk) _no complaints."

_Remarkable. He's actually unpleasant even compared to other volus._

"Of course," Thralog said. "If you and your, ah, companions would follow me, we can begin."

The volus nodded curtly and fell in behind him, flanked by the krogan. Thralog deliberately left his back to them, knowing they wouldn't make a move – but that it _would _put them off guard. Kan'dret almost said something to him, and Thralog could tell he was uneasy about presenting such an easy target even when he had five of his own men in the room, but they made it up to the main level in silence, the quiet broken only by footsteps and the quiet sucking noise of the volus's respiration systems.

As the door to the ground floor of the base slid open, Thralog could feel the electricity in the atmosphere. Every weapon in the place was lowered and carried at least somewhat discreetly on his orders, with most of the remaining Shadows gathered towards the main entrance and bridge, but the significance of the fact that now, for the first time in ten years, there were outsiders in the base wasn't lost on them. The air was tense and dry, and dozens of eyes watched them as they processed through the base and up the stairs to the second level.

Tomasz had organised the arrangements upstairs; six guards stood along the walls, each of them carrying a heavy pistol. The idea was that the arms would be small and by that less noticeable, but those pistols carried almost as much kick per shot as a Viper rifle. True to form, the volus's mercs didn't say a word about it. _Then again, what do you expect from a krogan?_

Thralog didn't bother to take a seat once they'd assembled on the top floor. _I doubt this will take long_. Instead, he waited until Tomasz and Kan'dret had moved around behind him and the men accompanying them had taken up their own positions, then turned to the volus with a carefully perfect smile on his face.

"Now," he said, "we can do business. I understand you have a recording-"

"Half now," the volus said.

Thralog frowned. "I'm sorry?"

"Half now. Half later. Twenty-five thousand."

Thralog was rather proud of the way he managed not to lose his smile at the insultingly arrogant tone in the volus's voice, and a sudden sense of cold in the air over his right shoulder told him that Tomasz was taking it slightly worse.

"Of course," he said, nodding. _Yes, we'll pay you. The only question is whether we ask for it back. _"Tomasz, transfer half of the funds to our friend here."

"Yes, boss," Tomasz said, with almost palpable reluctance. Thralog knew he'd never liked financial profligacy, and nobody liked the volus, but he knew the score well enough. The transfer took a few seconds before the volus brought up an omnitool, gave the display an almost casual glance, then stowed it away again.

"Your money's good," the volus said. Thralog carefully ignored the implication that it might not have been.

"Indeed," he said. "But you came here today for a reason. What do you know and how do you know it?"

"I heard them talking in a bar around 0500," the volus said, after a short pause. Thralog hated talking to volus. All batarians did, a result of the extreme importance of the eyes in the subtle, unconscious social body language particular to their species, but even quarians were preferable to the smug, self-serving attitude that every single volus in the galaxy seemed to have. "At first, I thought nothing of it. It wasn't peak hour, there weren't many people there, but they were loud. Drunk. They seemed to be celebrating something, and I found myself listening closer. Listen."

The volus opened his omnitool again and entered a few commands. Thralog's own device vibrated gently against his forearm as it received the file, but even as he opened it up to look at it the file began to play from the volus's display. There was no video, but the audio was crisp and clear, with only a little background noise audible.

"_-seven of them! Fucking seven!"_ one voice said excitedly, slurring the words a little. It sounded distinctly turian to Thralog.

"_This is turning – hey, watch it, man!"_ another turian voice said.

"_Sorry," _what sounded like a batarian rasped. _"I'll buy you another one."_

"_It's the principle – what was I saying?"_

"_Something... uh... something,"_ a salarian chimed in. He sounded considerably more drunken than the others. _Salarians never could hold their liquor._

"_'s about, like, turning,"_ the first turian said. _"Turning good!"_

"_No, no. I mean it's turning out better than I thought it would."_

"_What is?"_

"_The... you know, the whole... you know."_

"_The Shadows thing?"_

"_Yeah!"_

"_Wait, we went into this with you thinking it _wasn't_ going to turn out good? Do I mean 'good'? I mean, well. Good. W-"_

"_Not the point, man. We killed... Canax, what's our total?"_

"_'s, like, a hundred. Maybe more."_

"_Nah. Can't be more than eighty."_

"_Not the point! They don't have a fucking clue who we are! They were scared out of their fucking minds!"_

"_Those, uh, the bombs. They were good."_

"_Damn right!"_

"_Yeah! We'll tell Jirien how well that worked later."_

"_When's 'later', man? I need my fucking sleep."_

"_We won't be seeing much more of the bastards for a while. We can afford some time off."_

"_Don't know about you guys, but I could really use some azure."_

"_You and me both, man."_

"_I'll put in a message to all the teams to meet up for a general briefing. We'll meet, say, 0300?"_

"_My sleep cycle's been fucked to hell and back by this op."_

"_Cheer up, Teg. The Shadows can't stand much more of this. They'll collapse any day now, and then we're gravy."_

"_What the hell is gravy?"_

"_No idea. I heard some human say it once. Sounded good."_

"_So, 0300? Where?"_

"_Here!"_

"_Yeah!"_

"_What, so we can get drunk in the early morning?"_

"_Yeah!"_

"_We're doing exan- uh, exactly that, like, right now!"_

"_Fine, fine, we'll do it here if you really want to. But you've gotta actually turn up, OK? That means no complaining you have a hangover, no sneaking out to whorehouses or getting sandblasted. We're so close, guys. We can't fuck up now."_

"_Lighten the hell up, man."_

"_Yeah! Hey, where'd my drink go?"_

_"You drank it."_

"_God, really? Why?"_

"_Beats me."_

"Their inane chatter goes on for another half-hour," the volus said, stopping the playback. "It's all there in the file if you wish to listen to it, but that was the pertinent part."

Thralog took a slow, deep breath, and rubbed his chin, his mind clouded with calculations and plans. _0300, he said... that's in about three hours. Not long. But he delivered, all right. They knew too much for it to be a fake, and they're professional enough to know sending someone with these __idiot bodyguards would be suicide. It has to be genuine. Has to be. _

_We'll need to move fast..._

"How many of them are there?" he asked.

"There were four of them in the bar. Their conversation implies their total number is somewhere between ten and twenty."

"And what bar is this?"

"The Sentrola, on Fritais Avenue. Dagi District."

"You're certain?"

"I was there," the volus said coldly. "I have run considerable risk getting this information to you and your organisation. I would expect you to trust my word."

Thralog half-raised a hand in apology. "No offence meant. Is this everything?"

"You have the file and the location. What you do with them is not my concern."

"Tomasz, get downstairs," Thralog said, looking back over his shoulder. "Start working on strategy. We'll join you as soon as our business here is... concluded."

He couldn't resist leaving a tiny pause before the last word, and the brief smile that flashed across Tomasz's face told him he understood exactly what he meant by 'concluded'. The big human nodded once and moved past him towards the stairs. As he approached the krogan bodyguards Thralog could see their fingers tightening on the stocks of their guns, but they relaxed as he passed them. _Well, they're right to be cautious._ _Perhaps they're not quite so incompetent as they seem._

"We are done here, correct?" the volus said curtly, even before Tomasz had left the room.

"...yes," Thralog said. "We're done."

"Then I'll take the rest of my payment and leave."

"Ah, of course," Thralog said, and raised one hand. The volus regarded him with blank orange eyes, betraying nothing of the face beneath. "Your just deserts."

He snapped his fingers once, and the click seemed to echo around the room. There was an electric split-second of tension and anticipation, and then all hell broke loose. The guns the Shadows carried were relatively quiet as assault rifles went, but twelve of them were firing at once – and Kan'dret's was barely a foot away from his ear. The krogan vanished momentarily under a storm of crackling, deadly light, but it was over inside two seconds. The fire died as quickly as it had begun, and the two bodyguards keeled over, without firing a shot, onto the blood-splattered floor, the sheer volume of the fire obliterating shield, armour and body alike. The volus cowered between them, his arms over his head and his suit splashed with the krogans' viscera.

"Your stupidity really is quite exceptional," Thralog remarked, wiping a stray dribble of blood from his lapel. "Did you honestly think you could come in here and demand fifty thousand credits from me?"

"Please," the volus managed, his voice trembling badly as he said it. "P-please don't-"

"Don't what?"

"Don't k-k-"

"You'll have to speak up there," Thralog said. "I'm afraid I'm having trouble understanding you."

"Don't kill me!" the volus burst out. "Please! I g-gave you the data!"

"Well," Thralog said thoughtfully, "that is true. Is that not true, Kan'dret?"

Kan'dret grinned savagely. "I think that is true, yes."

"Certainly a point in your favour, then," Thralog said to the quivering volus. "You volus have a price for everything, don't you? How much do you value your life? Ten thousand credits? Twenty thousand?"

"I, I, I can pay you back," the volus said, and scrambled to his knees. He brought up his omnitool and – after a few false starts brought on by trembling hands – he entered a couple of commands. Thralog's own display automatically flickered into life, telling him that the 25,000 credits he'd paid out had been refunded.

"A wise choice," Thralog said. "Perhaps you're not quite as stupid as I thought."

"Still pretty stupid, though," Kan'dret added.

"Indeed," Thralog murmured, before turning back to the volus. "However, I'm afraid there's another problem. You know where we're based."

"I won't tell anyone!" the volus squeaked. Thralog felt a small, vicious pleasure at seeing his haughty demeanour evaporate entirely. "I swear!"

"As much as I'd like to take your word for it," he said, "you've already proven yourself to be... well, an informant. I'd have to be confident you wouldn't betray our generosity."

"I'll leave Omega tonight!" the volus said desperately. "I'll get out of the Terminus Systems!"

"Can I shoot him now?" Kan'dret said irritably. "He's getting on my nerves."

"You can shoot people later," Thralog said. "But I think our friend here deserves a second chance, don't you?"

"No," Kan'dret said bluntly.

"Well, we'll agree to disagree," Thralog said genially. The volus looked up at him with hope almost radiating from him. "I'll make you an offer, my rubbery friend."

"Anything!"

"We'll act on your information within a few hours. If we get them, you're free to go. If the info is bad..."

He left the sentence hanging, ostensibly for a show of menace but mostly because inventively painful deaths had never been his strong suit. _That's Ganak's territory. He'll be so happy._

"It's good, it's true!" the volus said frantically. "I swear!"

"We'll see," Thralog said shortly, and turned away. "Kan'dret, pick a few guys to stay on home guard and have them watch him. Everyone else goes with us."

Kan'dret raised an eyebrow. "Everyone?"

"Everyone. We'll need all the force we can get."

Kan'dret blinked slowly, then nodded. "True enough."

"And have someone get rid of the krogan before they start to smell," Thralog said, turning towards the door with the volus still kneeling behind him, krogan blood pooling around his legs. "Well, continue to smell. And... retrieve my father's armour from storage."

"Your father's- wait, you're not-"

"I am," Thralog said firmly. "I run the Shadows, as you may or may not know. I'm not letting this happen without my personal involvement."

"But why your father's, boss?" Kan'dret said, having to move at a trot to match Thralog's pace. "Isn't your own better fitted?"

"It's not about protection. It's about symbolism. If there's one symbol of unity, it's his armour."

"That's all well and good," Kan'dret grumbled, "but you can't fight bullets with ideas."

"They say ideas are bulletproof."

"Listen, kid," Kan'dret said bluntly, "you may be the boss, but I've got thirty years of experience over you."

"Your point?"

"If there's one thing I've learned, it's that _nothing_ is bulletproof."

* * *

Erash's voice suddenly crackled from Garrus's earpiece, making him jump a little. "Movement. Five cars heading out."

"Understood," Garrus said softly, letting his scope quiver a few millimetres upward. He was far enough away from the bridge he was focusing on for the tiny movement to send the crosshairs skidding up its entire length, stopping just short of the front entrance of the Shadows' base.

If you used it right, Omega was a sniper's paradise. Its winding streets and dilapidated buildings meant there was always somewhere to hide, while the huge towers that stretched hundreds of metres across the entire interior of the asteroid offered unparalleled vantage points. He'd found a broken old office building, scarred from years of gang warfare and wrecked by bombs, fires and general decay, from where he could see a dozen districts in almost perfect detail, and he was perched there now; crouched on an empty terrace two kilometres away from Kima District and the Shadows within, rifle to his shoulder. He'd been there for over two hours now, barely moving an inch.

"They're going towards Dagi District," Sensat murmured over the same line. "It looks like they've fallen for it."

"Just five cars, though?" Erash said. "That's no more than twenty men. I'd have expected more-"

"Oh, there are more," Garrus said. "A lot more."

His visor was telling him that he was exactly 2,023 metres away from the walkway connecting Shadows HQ to the rest of Kima District, but as the troops came marching out he could pick out every rivet in their armour, identify the guns they were carrying and, for those who were too foolhardy, stupid or poor enough not to be wearing a helmet, he could see their expressions. Batarians were hard to read at a distance, but they looked focused and serious to a man, and the handful of humans mixed among them looked similarly determined.

They were coming out of the front door of the base three abreast, marching at a brisk pace, and if not for the various different battle suits they were wearing they would have looked almost like an actual military force. The front three looked like the commanders, from what he could see; one was a burly bald human carrying what looked like a light machine gun while the other two were batarians toting M-8 Avengers. The one in the middle was wearing a heavy suit of crimson armour trimmed with black, enough to immediately mark him out as the leader of the group. For a moment, Garrus was sorely tempted to try and make a headshot, but even in the unlikely event that he made it it would still screw up everything they'd planned for. _Maybe later._

There were six heavies mixed in among them, clad in noticeably thicker armour and armed with big, shiny guns. Two carried some sort of missile launcher, three had flamethrowers, and one had an ominous black grenade launcher slung over his shoulder_. __Interesting. _He counted ten rows of three before the last of them was out of the base, every one of them heavily armed. _I guess that's what happens when you thin their ranks. Fewer people means less competition for equipment. Could be problematic later._

"How many?" Sensat asked.

"Thirty. Exactly."

"So we're looking at forty to fifty total," Erash said thoughtfully. "Outnumbered ten to one."

"Well, those aren't bad odds by our standards," Garrus said, watching the column snake to the right and start to disappear around the corner. "Especially if we've got a good position."

"And this is assuming they're stupid enough to try and retake their base," Erash said. "Likely, but not certain."

"Well, we'll found out soon enough," Garrus said. "Sidonis, you there?"

There was no response.

"Allow me to try something," Sensat said, after a pause. "I think this may work-"

"_Fuck!_" Sidonis suddenly yelped. "Ow! What the _fuck_-"

"I triggered a small electric charge in your com unit," Sensat said calmly. "Enough to wake you up."

"Hey, I wasn't asleep!" Sidonis said indignantly.

"Just resting your eyes?" Garrus inquired.

"Go to hell."

"Well, we're halfway there already." Garrus stood up, his limbs throbbing briefly as blood raced through them, and collapsed his rifle before returning it to his back. "Come and pick me up. Time to move."

"Oh, good," Sidonis said drily. There was a pause of maybe twenty seconds before a loud hum from below heralded the arrival of the aircar to Garrus's level, pulling up alongside the terrace with one door up. Garrus clambered in next to Sidonis, then they were immediately dropping away and out into the city as the door swung shut behind him.

"Sensat, send the signal," he said. "Let's get going."

* * *

Dineet Rhidok was not having a particularly good day.

In fact, he couldn't really remember the last time he'd had a good day. The last couple of weeks seemed to be nothing but an endless series of defeats and a constant, creeping sense of paranoia eating away within him. He'd lost friends but, far more importantly, he'd lost money; with the destruction of the sand labs, he couldn't skim the usual one percent or so from the packages that went to HQ. He still had a small cache he'd intended to sell, but that hadn't worked out either. People were afraid. They stayed off the streets for fear of taking a bullet in the head, and that meant he hadn't been able to offload any of his stash.

Worse still, _he_ was afraid, and that got to him badly. He hated the way he was forced to take winding back streets and hide away indoors for most of the day, and he hated himself for doing it. Self-preservation was the dominant instinct, but Dineet hated cowards almost as much as he hated losing money.

He hated a great many things.

Chief among them at the moment was the volus sitting across the room from him. He hated the volus anyway, but he reserved a special venom for this particular specimen. He'd been assigned guard duty, left alone in the Shadows' base with four other gang members to watch over the pathetic rubber-suited blob, and he hated that. He'd been so looking forward to having the opportunity to destroy the _fuckers_ who'd been making his life miserable for the last two weeks, and here he was acting as nothing more than a glorified, heavily-armed babysitter while forty-eight Shadows went out to war and had all the fun.

So, when the volus's omnitool display suddenly popped up, glowing orange and making the familiar bleeping sound of an incoming signal, he was already striding across the room to confront the little bastard. Mirki'it would be mad if he killed him before he gave the order, but Dineet had no doubt that a little roughing-up would be met with approval.

As he approached, the volus quickly scanned the screen and then killed it.

"What was that message?" Dineet demanded brusquely. The volus looked up at him expressionlessly and slid off his chair and onto his feet.

"What message?" the volus said, with almost insulting innocence.

Some people might have got the distinct feeling that something wasn't right at around this point. Dineet sailed straight past it.

"The message you just _got_, you little cunt," he said. "Don't fuck with me, or I'll fuck with you."

He was mentally congratulating himself for how clever that had sounded when the volus spoke again. By this point, the other guards dotted around the upper floor of the base had noticed the commotion and were starting to gravitate towards Dineet, sauntering over with the hope that some interesting violence might be about to occur. They were not wrong.

"Your proposal is acceptable," the volus said.

Dineet stared at him in disbelief as a faint ripple of laughter ran through the men watching. This wasn't what he'd expected at all. Why the hell was the volus acting so differently all of a sudden? He resolved to assert his dominance through careful use of rapier-sharp wit.

"Fuck you," he said.

"So you retract your proposal?"

The volus's voice was maddeningly calm, and that spurred Dineet on.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Your proposal," the volus said. "Were you not challenging me to a fight?"

Dineet paused for a second, then threw his head back and laughed, getting a few snickers from the rest of the men. "_You_ want to fight _me_?" he said.

"I would prefer to avoid violence if at all possible, but some situations mandate it. However, if you no longer wish to-"

"Fuck that!" Dineet said, grinning like a madman. "I'll take you on. Come at me!"

He'd meant it as a joke, to an extent, so it was another shock when the volus slowly stepped forward until he was barely a metre away and raised his fists.

There was a second's incredulous pause before the guards broke down in laughter.

"What's the matter, Din?" one of them said. "You scared?"

"I don't know if you can handle him, man, he's pretty big!" another called.

Dineet grinned again and raised his own fists. He hated a lot of things, but he was going to _enjoy_ this.

He threw the first – and only – punch. It wasn't all that hard, mainly designed as an opener, but he had no doubt it would knock the volus on his fat ass anyway. It came as a surprise, then, when the volus calmly caught his fist in an iron grip and crushed most of the bones in his hand to powder.

He reeled back in agonised shock, grunting as the pain started to register, but the volus was moving and, as crazy as it sounded, seemed to be _growing_. Another vice-like hand wrapped itself around his throat as the others shouted in alarm and scrambled back, and Dineet stared down into the blank orange eyes of the volus somehow holding him a foot off the ground.

The volus looked back, tilted his head a little to the side, and hurled Dineet bodily out of the window. The world in front of his eyes blurred into a black, orange and grey whirl, and then he hit the bridge in front of the base with a heavy crash. He bounced once. Touched down again. Rolled like a ragdoll. Ran out of bridge.

It was a long, long way down, and Dineet Rhidok _hated_ heights.


	27. Sanctuary: Running Out

**SANCTUARY**

**FIVE: RUNNING OUT

* * *

  
**

"Fuck," Sidonis said appreciatively, as they reached the top of the stairs. "I like your style, Mel. You know that?"

"Thank you," Melenis said. He was standing alone in the middle of the room, limbs retracted to normal size, looking about as dangerous as a sedated elcor. The effect was only slightly undercut by the four bodies lying around the room, and the thick pools of sour-smelling yellowish blood accumulating on the floor.

"What did you even do to this guy?" Erash said, poking one of the guards lying face down on the floor with the toe of his boot. "I didn't know batarians had that much blood."

"I believe I broke his spine," Melenis said. "After that, I broke it again."

"A wise move," Garrus said, "but we don't have time to waste. They're all dead?"

"Certainly," Melenis said. "Unless the one I threw out of the window miraculously survived. However, that is extremely unlikely."

"Uh, good," Garrus said. "Good. Uh, Erash, head back to the garage and wire some of the cars to blow. See if we can take a few of them down when they try coming in through the garage. Maybe seal the door after you're done to buy some time."

"I'll see what I can do," Erash said, patting the belt of explosives slung around his waist, and disappeared back downstairs, stepping over another batarian corpse as he went. Garrus watched him go, then turned back to the others.

"I have a blueprint for the building," Sensat said, looking up from the orange glow of his omnitool. "Looks like they've got some sort of shutters down on the lower levels. We can seal them shut to keep them out, but it's not a permanent solution. They'd have the codes to get them open again within a few minutes, and once they're through, I can't shut them again."

"Anything that'll help," Garrus said. "Shut them down once Erash is done, then get back up here."

"Understood," Sensat said, turning away, but Garrus's attention was already elsewhere. "We need to stop them from coming over the bridge," he said, looking to Melenis and Sidonis. "Any ideas?"

"I guess we could try blocking it off," Sidonis said, scratching his chin with the barrel of his assault rifle. Garrus winced inwardly at his grasp of gun safety, but didn't bother correcting him. It hadn't worked the last five times he'd tried. "There were a couple of trucks in the garage. One of them could funnel them into a sweet killzone."

"True," Melenis said, "but it also acts as a deterrent. They may well seek another route instead of blindly rushing into our fire, and that would be disastrous."

"Agreed," Garrus said. "It's not worth the risk. It does seem like a waste to not use those-"

He trailed off as a sudden thought occurred to him, then quickly brought up his omnitool and connected to their general squad frequency.

"Erash, you in the garage yet?"

"Yep," Erash's voice said into his earpiece. "What's up?"

"You see those trucks?"

"Pretty hard to miss."

"What make are they?"

"Uh... KG8, I think. Yeah. Why?"

"That means they use the Salviea navi-com, right?"

"Should do. What do you want them for?"

"We can override the security systems pretty easily," Garrus said. "That means we can program in any course we like."

"So what?" Erash said. "That's nice, but how- oh." Garrus could _hear_ the moment it slotted into place in his mind. "Oh, I like that. You're a sly one, you know that?"

"I try," Garrus said. "Sensat, you get all that?"

"Yes. It can be done."

"Good. Set it up once you're done down there so that they crash into the bridge, somewhere around the middle. That should be a nice surprise for our shadowy friends."

"Well, that sure beats my idea," Sidonis said, shrugging. "More explosions are always better."

"Do you think they have some kind of mounted gun around here somewhere?" Garrus said. "That would help."

"I'll check, but I doubt it," Sensat said, and cut the connection. An oddly complete silence settled over the room with the disappearance of the conversation; the base felt eerily deserted even with five of them in the building. It was well-lit and furnished well if sparsely, but it felt cavernous nevertheless. The empty bunks lining the wall and the general detritus that comes from keeping fifty armed men together in one place for more than five minutes were strange to see, reminders that their enemies were people too. _People who we're going to be killing soon enough._

"Hey, what happened to those krogans we hired?" Sidonis said suddenly.

"They're dead," Melenis replied. "Their bodies were removed."

"You can still smell the blood," Garrus said, sniffing. "Even with the batarian stuff."

"You can tell different species' blood apart by the way it smells?" Sidonis said sceptically.

"...yes, that is probably a bad sign, isn't it?" Garrus mused, walking over to the window overlooking the bridge. "There's a lot of things that we just weren't meant to smell. Like the inside of an elcor. Ever done that?"

"Uh, no?" Sidonis said.

"Good. Try not to do it. It stays with you for a while. That was, what, my tenth day on the job at C-Sec? Something like it. Somebody blew an elcor out of the top floor of a tower with some kind of rocket launcher. Damn near burst when it hit the sidewalk. Hell of a thing for a rookie to see. Hell of a thing for anyone to see, come to think of it."

"Are you making this shit up?"

"No. There's more to the Citadel than just the Presidium, you know. Crime for all the family."

"You ever find the guy who did it?"

"Actually, yes," Garrus said, turning back with a thin smile on his face. "See, an elcor weighs an awful lot, and that means you need a big, big gun to launch one out of a window. Big enough that the blowback incinerated everything in the room. So, when I say we found him, I mean we found some overcooked meat and a lot of smoke. A rather neat conclusion to the case, I thought. Well, except for the elcor all over the road. That was, uh, less neat."

"I so don't believe you."

"Check the extranet. Probably something about it on there."

"If I might interrupt," Melenis said calmly, "perhaps this is best left for another time."

"Oh, yeah," Garrus said sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck. "Yeah. OK, we need to start building up some barricades at the front entrance. We can use the couches to-"

A sound off in one corner of the room made him jump, and before he knew it his pistol was already in his hands and aimed at its source. It took him about a second to place it; it had been the standard chime indicating an incoming call on an omnitool, and sure enough the forearm of one of the broken bodies on the floor of the room was pulsing a gentle orange as the display flickered above it.

"They have discovered the deception," Melenis noted. "We do not have long."

The chiming was suddenly cut off and replaced with a batarian voice as the call was forced through.

"Polak, you'd better pick this up right fucking now," it snarled. "We have a problem. Polak?"

"Melenis, start moving the couches," Garrus said, and began to walk towards the body. "Sidonis, help him. I'll handle this, maybe stall him."

"Oh, sure," Sidonis muttered. "We do the heavy lifting-"

Garrus waved a hand. "Just go."

Sidonis grunted in resignation. "I'm going, I'm going."

The two of them had already left and clattered downstairs by the time Garrus got to the omnitool. It was still squawking about Polak and the various things the voice on the other end of the line would do to him if he didn't pick up, most of them obscenely biological, but the voice suddenly stopped dead when he transferred the call onto his own system.

"Hello," Garrus said.

"Who the fuck is this?" the voice demanded.

"Well, now, that's a long story..."

_**

* * *

**_

Thralog looked up at the smoke pouring out of the shattered windows of the building in front of him and felt a hot, tight quasar of anger churn and boil within him.

They'd been played, he thought bitterly. Again. That _fucking_ volus had lied to them all along, and now eight more Shadows were dead, caught in the blast of the nail bomb left where they'd been promised revenge, and the hate and rage were coiling up within him like twin burning snakes.

Some people passed through passionate, fiery anger and reached the ice-cold, quiet lagoon on the other side. So far, Thralog wasn't one of them. The venomous fire inside him had instead begun to draw in on itself, retreating to a white-hot nucleus that burned hotter and brighter every second, like there was a star blazing away in the core of his brain. _They have no right to do this to us. They have no right._

"Kan'dret's dead, boss," Tomasz said quietly. Thralog hadn't even noticed him coming up behind him – hadn't seen him at all since that fireball had punched its way out of the building like the fist of an angry giant, but the dull, dark edge in the human's voice told him everything he needed to know about what he was thinking.

"Yes, I suppose he would be," Thralog said, and even he could hear the bitter hate in his voice. Neither of them were speaking loudly at all, but the dead silence among the men assembled around them was enough to let their voices carry easily. "He _will_ be avenged, Tom."

"Vengeance is what brought us here in the first place," Tomasz warned. "If we keep fighting, we may lose it all."

"There's no 'if' about it," Thralog said grimly. "This goes to the finish. Either we wipe the bastards out or die trying. The Shadows do not run."

"...as you wish, then," Tomasz said. "I'll follow you until the end. You know that."

Thralog inhaled deeply. The acrid sting of smoke coursed through his nose and throat, rubbing them raw, but he was well past caring about things like that. Physical pain was almost imperceptible compared to the wounds running beneath the surface.

"Then we'll make an ending of it," he said, and turned. Tomasz looked down at him with an expression of melancholic seriousness and nodded.

"-if you don't pick up right goddamn now, Polak, I'm going to ram your fucking omnitool-" Ganak was practically screaming, away off to one side, but when he suddenly fell silent all eyes turned to him.

"Who the fuck is this?" he said, after a pause.

_So it's them. They lured us out here, and now they've taken over our base and killed our guards. And they're picking up..._

"I'll take it from here, Ganak," Thralog said. "Let me talk to him."

Ganak nodded silently and transferred the call to Thralog's 'tool.

"Whoever this is," he said as soon as he was connected, "I am the leader of the Shadows."

"Your title seems to become less impressive by the second," an unbearably smug turian voice said on the other end. "We're past forty now, including your guards. Tell me, Mr. Leader of the Shadows, how many of your men did our little bomb just kill?"

The mocking tone of the voice was enough to tighten the fiery knot in his stomach even further, but Thralog forced himself to speak with something approaching calm.

"Not enough," he said. "You will not survive the night."

"Ah, but the night is young," the turian drawled. "There's a few hours left of it yet. A man can do a lot with a few hours. By the way, this is a nice place you have here. Very roomy."

Thralog fought hard to stop his teeth from grinding against one another. "You'll gain nothing from this," he said, and his voice was a sword-edge forged in the impossible inferno within him. "You must understand that. The Shadows will survive, and you will die."

"Well, I don't dispute the second part," the voice said thoughtfully. "But who knows what the future holds, eh? I can make one educated guess, I suppose: one of us will not survive the night. A little less specific than your offering, but I think it's a fairly safe bet. Speaking of which, oh, say... five hundred credits says that I'm the one who lives."

Thralog stared wordlessly down at his blank omnitool, infuriated beyond words.

"Hey, don't feel pressured," the turian went on. "It's just a bit of fun. Are you in?"

"No," Thralog said blandly. "No, I'm not."

"Ah, a shame. Still, I could probably just take it from your body if I kill you. You're the one in the red armour, are you not? I imagine that's probably worth a fair amount. It's very nice."

"It was my father's," Thralog said. "You killed him."

"...I _thought_ I recognised that suit," the voice said, after a moment. "He was one of the first we hit, wasn't he? We had no idea he was anybody special. Nothing personal, anyway."

"Nothing personal?" Thralog said slowly, and _now_ he was past fire and into jet-black, smooth, unyielding ice. The hot rage froze over inside him and turned cold in an instant until there was nothing left but simple, distilled, numbing hate.

"No. Nothing personal."

"Then what was it?"

"Justice."

"Justice," Thralog echoed hollowly.

"Your father was a murderer and a drug dealer," the voice said conversationally. "He ended a lot of lives and ruined a lot more. What right did he have to live when so many innocents die around him?"

"And how is what you're doing any different?"

The turian chuckled quietly. "Oh, it's not. We're just a little more... discriminating."

"Who the hell do you think you are?" Thralog said coldly.

"Nothing more than a concerned citizen, looking out for the best interests of the community at large."

"So that's it? You think you're some kind of guardian angel?" Thralog said, quietly furious. "You think you're doing good?"

"More or less."

"If you took the Shadows out of the equation, all that would happen is that the Blue Suns would move in and pick up the slack, and they're worse than we could ever be."

"Perhaps. But that's a problem for another day."

"What, you think you can take on the Suns now?" Thralog said contemptuously.

"Well, we've kicked your asses all over the district for two weeks now. I'm itching for a real fight."

Thralog was a millisecond away from losing control and screaming at the bastard before he caught himself, knowing that the guy was trying to provoke him. _Am I reduced to taking victories as small as this?_

"We haven't had a real fight," he said instead, keeping his voice level. "You're cowards. Ambushes, bombs, assassinations-"

"Also, sabotage and subterfuge," the turian cut in. "Can't forget those."

"If you had any kind of honour, then you'd fight us on a fair field of play – and die," Thralog said. He damn well didn't believe in fighting with honour, but there was the off-chance that a turian might be moved by an appeal to it. _But not this one, I think._

"That's not honour," the turian said. "Honour is using everything you have and giving everything you can give. If you could have done more but chose not to, that's dishonour. If you can't handle the best we have, then that doesn't make us dishonourable. It makes us superior."

"You're nothing but common murderers."

"Even if that were true, we'd at least be killing in the name of justice. What did you kill for?" The turian's voice was becoming noticeably harsher, a bitter edge creeping into his tone. "When you murdered the junkies you'd taken everything from because they couldn't pay their debts, what was that? When people wouldn't pay your protection money, what did they die for? Profits before people, right? What use are the weak if you can't bleed them dry before leaving them in the dust? You have no right to call anyone a murderer. You have no right to live, just like your father before you."

"I'll see you pay for everything you've done," Thralog said softly, staring out over the edge of the walkway and into the heart of Omega. "You'll never destroy the Shadows, but they'll take everything from you."

"Hah. Come and try."

The line went dead.

Thralog slowly lowered his hand from his earpiece and rested it on the railing. Omega pulsed in front of his eyes, but he wasn't really seeing it. He could smell the smoke, hear the crackle and feel the heat from the fire raging through the building behind him, but none of it seemed real. He knew there were forty men standing behind him, but he felt as isolated as ever.

_They have to die_.

He heard Tomasz coming up behind him, but the human didn't speak. Thralog waited until his footsteps stopped, then turned.

"We go back, Tom," he said. "We fight."

Tomasz smiled wanly, his shaven scalp glinting in the light of the blazing building. "We fight," he echoed. "Stubborn until the end. Just like your father."

Thralog chuckled at that, but there wasn't any real mirth in it. "My father died, Tom. I'll have to be better."

_**

* * *

**_

"They're coming back," Sensat said calmly over the comm line. "Their cars are approaching."

"So they're going for it," Garrus murmured, half to himself. "Everything ready?"

"The trucks are in position and the shutters are down," Sensat said. "I assume they're able to tell, but they might not. If they don't know they're down and split their forces, we can benefit."

"Wouldn't count on it. The welcome party's ready to blow any time, though," Erash added. His voice double-tracked slightly as he spoke; he was just downstairs, manning the front barricade along with Melenis, which meant Garrus could just about hear him outside the line as well as over it.

"And we have the garage covered," Sidonis said. "No way in."

"Well, there's always the bridge," Garrus said. "It's just difficult. Trying it might cause a terminal case of being shot in the face."

He adjusted his position slightly, wedging his knee into the wall to steady himself, but his view down the bridge was already almost perfect; anyone trying to cross it would take a bullet through the head before they got halfway unless they were smart enough to all go at once. _Good thing they're not smart._

"Fifty seconds to contact," Sensat said. "We should be seeing some activity on your end soon."

"Nothing yet," Garrus said. The end of the bridge was still completely empty, but he had no doubt that it wouldn't be that way for long. The main superstructures of Kima district opened out onto it via an entrance only as wide as the bridge itself, which meant any assault would have to be funnelled through the gap even before it hit the killzone.

The seconds ticked by agonisingly slowly, the anticipation seemingly dragging them out to minutes of deep, concentrated silence. The only sounds were the whines of distant skycars and the minute scrapes of drawn breath transmitted over the comm line. He was struck by the calmness of it all and quietly impressed; silent, coordinated efficiency like this was usually reserved for professional soldiers, not ragtag groups of what were – _let's face it – _little more than hired guns, but when it came right down to it, his team, despite all its banter and lack of protocol and general unprofessionalism, could fight along with the best of them.

_And we _are_ a team, aren't we? More than a squad. Maybe Shepard rubbed off on me more than I thought._

He opened up a few menus in his visor with a flick of his eye and browsed through his music selection, mostly just to pass the time. He scrolled through a few pages of it before one track jumped out at him as oddly appropriate. _OK, so it's a bridge instead of a courtyard, but that's close enough._

He'd just added to his queue and was about to hit 'play' when a sudden flash of movement at the end of the bridge caught his eye. An armoured figure – identifiable even from this range – was leaning out into sight, helmeted head peeking around the corner before starting to jerk back into cover.

_And... show time._

His shot was instinctive, and it showed; he'd only had a fraction of a second to aim at a fraction of a target, and the bullet sparked harmlessly away off the metal wall behind his mark. A millisecond passed, and then suddenly a dozen more shapes stormed out of the bridge entrance, laying down heavy suppressing fire as they came. Garrus had enough time to quickly survey the situation before the withering volley forced him to duck down into cover; their intention had clearly been to force any defenders away from their positions long enough to start making an advance. _Fair enough. Good move. Allow me to respond._

The rattle of Erash and Melenis's rifles started up downstairs, and Garrus rose again over the half-wall, rifle at the ready. A shot presented itself almost immediately; most of the Shadows had kept to the sides of the bridge, using what little cover was afforded by the pillars lining it, but more were flooding through the entrance every second. It was child's play to pick a helmetless target, line up the crosshairs over the centre of his skull, and drill a hole through it.

A small section of the top right of his HUD lit up as the batarian jerked and fell, leaking grey fluid from his cranium. It read: **1**

As it flicked on, his music queue automatically started to play, and the ferocious drums of _Fire In The Courtyard_ began to hammer in his ears even as his scope twitched ever so slightly to the right, just enough to bring another head into the crosshairs. The familiar fire of adrenalin began to light up his veins, and a thin, savage smile etched itself across his face as his rifle bucked in his hands and another Shadow went down like a sack of bricks.

_Outnumbered ten to one by people trying to kill you, in the most corrupt, evil hellhole in the galaxy, knowing you'll be lucky if you make it through the night... it doesn't get any better than this._

**2**

_**

* * *

**_

The aircar didn't bother with a proper landing. When it hit the floor, it screeched sideways for a few metres before eventually coming to rest in a shower of sparks, but Thralog was already ducking under the door as it came up before that. He landed slightly awkwardly, but Tomasz's strong hand was there on his shoulder to steady him as the next car screamed to a halt barely a couple of metres away, its occupants already piling out. He turned to see the human's big, creased face, and nodded his thanks, but the next car was already landing and the landing party advancing.

Thralog took a second to orient himself, then raised his assault rifle to his shoulder and followed the throng of Shadows up towards the entrance to the garage. He knew damn well that he wasn't a military leader and accordingly left it to Tomasz, who'd shouldered his way to the front and was leading the group up past the remaining cars. Something seemed off about the scene, and Thralog hesistated a moment, trying to place it. _The trucks. Where the hell did the trucks go?_

_They took them. Why?_

_Weapons._

The thought process was more or less instantaneous, but it took him a second to think about whether he should bring it up before they were out of the garage and on more defensible territory; the garage was accessible only by one opening, and a few troops could quite easily hold it against a larger force if they knew what they were doing. _But it's still less of a death trap than that fucking bridge._

The last car hit the ground behind them, jolting him back to the realities of the situation. He glanced up to see that he'd fallen behind a little, and was running slightly faster to catch up when the cars blew up.

Two of them went, one on either side of the central aisle they were heading up. He didn't comprehend exactly what had happened at first; all he saw was a blinding flash of light, painful even through the visor of his helmet. The noise was utterly deafening, a violent roar that seemed to physically knock him back as the explosions threw him backwards off his feet.

He lay there for a few seconds, stunned and winded. He couldn't hear anything at all, and all he could see was the ceiling, already blanketed with thick black smoke. Then some odd streaks of light started to blast past over him, dozens of them, and then a shape passed over him and he began to move, dragged away by the collar of his suit until a car came in sight, inches in front of his eyes.

Something clicked inside his head, and he scrambled to his feet. Sound and vision rebooted, and suddenly he could hear the rattle of gunfire at close range – and past that, barely audible, groans and muffled screams.

"Fucking _hell!_" a voice snarled to his left, and he looked around to see Tomasz crouched behind the car along with him, firing blindly over the top of it with his assault rifle. Scarlet blood was streaming down the human's face from a gash on his forehead, and shards of shrapnel were embedded in his armour, but he looked mostly uninjured. He glanced around at Thralog and something approaching relief passed over his face for a second. "Thought I'd lost you there for a second," he said, slotting a fresh thermal clip into his rifle. "What a goddamn mess."

Thralog's head was pounding painfully, as if someone was beating away at it from the inside with a hammer, but he was still mobile, and he looked around for his gun. It was well out of his reach in the middle of the crossfire, so he drew his pistol instead and returned fire.

"They took the trucks, Tom!" he called, and ducked back into cover as a volley of shots swept overhead.

"What?" Tomasz shouted back.

"The trucks! They're gone!"

The human looked around, then turned back to him. "You're right!"

"They'll use them against us!"

"I'll radio a warning- _shit!_"

A horrible sinking feeling enveloped Thralog as he realised Tomasz's eyes were fixed on something directly behind him, but even as he started to turn Tomasz grabbed him bodily and practically threw him in the other direction before diving after him. Before he hit the ground, the grenade he'd spotted exploded.

Thralog was blinded and deafened again and hurled against a wall, the breath leaving him in one wheezing gasp, but his kinetic barriers protected him from the shrapnel. He struggled to his feet, out of cover, and managed to hurl himself back behind the car, more bullets ripping through the space he'd been occupying a split second later. Tomasz was lying face-down on the floor, not moving.

"Fuck," Thralog snarled through gritted teeth, and pushed the human's heavy body over onto its back. He had no idea whatsoever how to give medical attention to a human, so he settled for punching him in the chest a few times. "Come on! Come _on!_"

On the fourth hit, Tomasz grunted, and his eyes snapped back open.

"Agh," he managed, and forced himself up onto his knees. "Ah, that _hurt_."

He was holding his side with both hands, but blood was still leaking through his armour and fingers to trickle down onto the floor. His suit would automatically be administering medigel, but Thralog knew it was still enough to cause serious difficulty for the man. It wouldn't stop him fighting... _but it might stop him winning._

"Dammit," Thralog muttered, and opened the comm channel to the team which had entered the garage. "Shadow One to Team Two. Report in if you're still alive."

He waited a few seconds while his omnitool compiled a list of all those still transmitting over the line, which was faster than trying to tell apart the actual responses, and grimaced. Twenty had gone in. Thirteen were still alive. Four of those weren't going to make it. That left nine, and Tomasz was wounded.

"Concentrated suppressing fire on my mark," he said, grabbing his pistol from the ground. Beside him, Tomasz got up, grunting in pain, and reached for his fallen assault rifle. "Let's force the bastards back. Mark!"

He and Tomasz rose simultaneously and opened fire on the garage entrance, and a storm of fire from in front and behind of them joined them. Thralog edged out into the aisle and stooped to retrieve his own rifle, still firing one-handed with his heavy pistol until its clip burned out, then quickly switched weapon and continued firing. There was still some returned fire, but they were definitely pushing them back by the sheer volume of bullets they were pumping into the area, and as Thralog advanced he caught sight of two figures bolting from their cover at the top of the stairs and running like hell back towards the main part of the base. He shouted something incomprehensible even to him over the roaring gunfire out of sheer, savage exhilaration, and then they broke forward and charged up towards the abandoned position, leaving the dead and dying behind them.

They'd lost one more in the advance, a lucky shot cleaving through one unfortunate Shadow's shields to rip apart an unarmoured head, but Tomasz was still moving and shooting by his side. The smoke was chokingly thick in the air and the heat from the burning cars was still easily felt, his head was on fire and his body battered and bruised, his organisation in ruins and his lieutenants dropping like flies – but Thralog felt more _alive_ than he had in years. Battle rage took over almost entirely, and somehow he found himself leading the survivors up to the base, one thought pounding over and over in his head: _the Shadows don't run._

_**

* * *

**_

**4**

Garrus's thermal clip ejected, hissing and fading, and he ducked down into cover before reloading. _Wait for the suppressing fire..._

Right on time, another wave of shots blasted through the open side of the building and perforated the wall on the other side of the room, missing him entirely. He waited until the shots were few and inaccurate enough to risk moving and rose to pick a target.

They'd been slightly smarter than he'd expected; a few of them had had smoke grenades, and the bridge was covered with a thick, curling grey blanket of the stuff, billowing up into the sky and over the edges. Appropriately, all he could see of the Shadows were faint shadows moving around inside, but that didn't matter; they were still firing at Melenis and Erash down below, and that meant he had a reference point. His visor analysed the firing paths and backtraced them to their source while simultaneously penetrating partway into the cloud with infrared, even helpfully outlining his targets with a flashing red border. It almost felt unsporting.

His rifle cracked four times, twice to shred the kinetic barriers and twice more to pump two rounds straight through the chest of one shape. Even with his aim assists, he was forced to aim for the chest – and both armour and shields were always strongest there. It didn't stop his HUD from registering a sharp spray of hot blood on its thermal vision as the luckless Shadow jerked and went down.

**5**

He grinned tightly and looked to pick out a new target, but just as one came in scope a series of heavy blows forced him back an an assault rifle was turned on him. It was chewing away at his shields like fire through paper and the physical force of the deflection was like being punched through his armour, but he managed to throw himself flat before his barriers went entirely. Winded, he rolled back to underneath his firing position, breathing heavily and waiting for his shields to recharge before he dared look out again. His music was still battering away in his ears, but it faded down as a transmission came in.

"They've forced us back," Sensat was saying breathlessly on the other end, and the sound of gunfire nearby was clearly audible. "Coming back to the main base. They have the garage."

"Damn it," Garrus hissed. "OK, let me think. Uh, Erash, leave the barricade and back them up. Sensat, send in the trucks."

"Both of them?"

"Ten second delay. Do it."

"Understood," Sensat said simply.

"Looks like it's all you, Mel," Erash said. "Let's go."

Garrus's HUD told him that his shields had recharged to 83%, and he figured that was enough. He sprang up and scoped the bridge at random, hoping there'd be someone in his sights. Sure enough, the flashing red outline appeared again, and he fired four more shots in less than two seconds. The Shadow fired his rifle wildly as he went down, sending ghostly blue light flickering through the smoke – **6** – and Garrus flicked his scope right to the next target. He only had three shots left in the clip and the guy was running across the bridge at full tilt, but two of the rounds connected anyway; his shields were already weakened by the fire at the barricades, and two shots were enough to rip away what was left and send a bullet crashing through his shoulder. Garrus heard the harsh scream of pain even over the music and the gunfire, but he wasn't dead yet, and he was in the middle of reloading when the building shook and a blast of heat and noise roared up from below.

"...this is bad," Erash observed.

_Well, can't fault him for not staying cool under pressure. _"Status?"

"You know that barricade we had?"

"Yes?"

"Yeah, that's gone."

Garrus winced. "What happened?"

"Well, there was an explosion, and then everything hurt."

"That _does_ sound bad," Garrus said thoughtfully, and the first truck smashed into the bridge. He'd missed its approach entirely, too absorbed in the conversation, but it had screamed down out of the sky and slammed into the bridge like a meteor. A vast lump of metal screeched across the width of the other end of the bridge, crushing some and sending others flying and flailing over the edge – _and it's a long way down_ – before exploding with a howling fireball that knocked Garrus back even from as far away as he was. It carved a huge swathe through the smoke and sent the whole area quaking before its broken, burning husk rammed straight through the duracrete barrier on the side of the bridge and plunged into the twilight below. _Oh, I really hope nobody's out at this time of night down there._

"Strike one!" Erash called gleefully.

_**

* * *

**_

Ganak's head felt like it was stuffed with cement dust. The explosion from the truck – _a fucking truck! -_ had sent him flying against the side of the bridge, knocking the wind out of him and cracking his skull agonisingly against the hard duracrete. He could feel blood trickling down his face, and the acrid smoke they'd laid down as cover was burning his throat, but he was still alive. That was good enough.

He pushed himself to his feet, barely able to register the shouts of confusion and panic around him, and stooped to reclaim his grenade launcher. As he straightened up again, still dazed, he staggered back and looked down in puzzlement. It seemed like someone had just punched him a few times in the stomach.

_Your shields were down..._

He lowered his left hand to his midriff. It felt completely numb, but when he took it away it dripped with his own blood. He held it up in front of his face, watching the reflections of the firefight play across the drops. It was oddly beautiful.

_So, it's like that, is it? Figured it would end something like this._

A faint whine made him look up.

_Hah. That all you got?_

Another truck was coming in. It was distant now, but it was moving fast. It would be here any second.

It looked rather like it was aimed directly at him.

_Bring it on,_ he thought, almost giddily. _The Shadows don't run._

Ganak stepped forwards and took his grenade launcher in both hands. He only had one more round loaded.

_Enough._

Slight twinges of pain penetrated the thick, numb cloud in his stomach as he took aim, but they were barely enough to register. For a second, it seemed like all the strength had gone from his arms, but he found some more – _no idea how_ – and steadied himself. The truck danced in his sights, howling towards him like a demon in the Omega night. He stood his ground.

_The Shadows don't run.

* * *

_

Garrus just about heard the second one coming in, and when he looked right his visor picked the box of grey metal out of the sky and highlighted it as it screamed in towards the bridge. It was seconds away from impact by the time he saw it, coming in at a sharp downwards angle towards the very middle of the bridge – and then something tiny arced across the zoomed-in visor display, a small white sphere he didn't recognise, and a bright orange flash burned suddenly into his retina as the front of the vehicle exploded. Shattered metal rained down over the bridge, but the explosion had been powerful enough to knock the truck off course, and Garrus gazed in horror as it bucked and then slammed into the near side of the bridge, tearing itself horizontally in two and sending its fiery wreckage tearing down into the darkness below. The noise was terrific, but the only damage it had done had been to itself; it had been forced just too low to actually make it onto the bridge itself and had just smashed itself apart on the side.

"Unbelievable," Erash said, as the rolling thunder of the explosion's echo began to fade. "Did you see that? That cloaca with the grenade launcher shot it down!"

"What," Sensat said flatly.

"I'm not kidding!"

"Indeed," Garrus muttered, and found his target, the one with the grenade launcher; he was standing almost transfixed, not even looking in his direction. He emptied the rest of his clip into him out of pure frustration, seven shots in all, and the number on his HUD ticked up one higher as another corpse hit the ground. "Dead now, though."

"What, you killed him?"

Garrus slid down into cover and reloaded. "Should I not have?" he said.

"That guy was a total badass," Erash said indignantly. "He deserved at least a one-on-one fistfight."

"What?"

"That's no way for a man to go out. It should have been a fistfight, but on top of a clock tower. In a lightning storm."

"Naturally," Garrus said, rolling his eyes.

"Have I mentioned that they're getting dangerously close?" Erash said. "Rather too close for comfort, actually."

"Fall back if you have to," Garrus said, and rose again to survey the situation. Erash was right; the Shadows had advanced slowly, using all the cover they could muster, but a few of the braver souls were at the last few metres of the bridge before it reached the base itself. They were keeping up a continuous wave of suppressing fire towards the entrance and taking advantage of the lack of return fire to move up. He grimaced and targeted one, bringing him down in two shots, one taking out the remains of his shield and one drilling through his brain. He had time to line up another shot and empty his clip into another Shadow before one of them noticed his allies were dropping and sent a burst of fire back at Garrus, forcing him to duck down again.

"Uh, I'm going to retreat now," Erash said conversationally. "Quite fast."

Garrus looked longingly at his rifle for a moment, but he knew he was past the point where sniping would be useful. Instead, he collapsed and holstered it, drawing his assault rifle as he peeled away from his cover on the upper level and ran towards the stairs.

"I'm coming down," he said, taking the stairs three at a time. "We can't let them get inside."

"Man, we are so going to have to redecorate once we're done here," Erash said wistfully. As Garrus jumped the last few steps and skidded to a halt, he saw that he was right; the ground floor was a mess, the makeshift barricade of furniture blown to smithereens and dozens of bullet holes peppering the back wall. Erash had taken cover behind one of the sofas they'd left standing and Garrus sprinted over to join him, keeping low to avoid the worst of the fire. It still wiped his shields before he got there – _and a couch isn't exactly good cover._

"Oh, hello," Erash said, slotting a fresh clip into his gun. "Nice to see you again. How fucked are we?"

Another burst of fire rattled in from the entrance, and Garrus fired blindly back over the top of the sofa. To his right, a couple of bullets burst through the soft fabric and pinged away off a wall, trailing white specks of stuffing as they went.

"Quite badly, from what I can see," he said, and killed his music. "Melenis, report."

"We are under heavy fire," the volus answered, as psychotically calm as ever, "but we are holding this position."

"_Fuck!_" Sidonis yelped over the same line. "Agh! Dammit, that _hurt!_"

"A flesh wound," Sensat said shortly. "You'll be fine."

"It still hurt!"

"Uh, Garrus," Erash said, "problem."

"What?" Garrus twisted around to look over the top of the sofa, just in time to see the smoky red roar of a flamethrower powering straight towards him.

_Oh, that can't be good._

He hit the ground again an instant before a bright tongue of flame howled overhead, just a few feet away from his face and painfully hot. The second it died away he was on his feet again and looking for the source, and as soon as he saw the batarian lugging the matte-black metal flamer around he opened fire on him. Erash joined him, Garrus's visor showed him exactly where to aim for maximum penetrative power, and between them their fire nixed his shields and reorganised his innards inside two seconds. They dropped back down as his buddies opened up, and more and more of the sofa was chewed away in the crossfire.

It was also on fire.

_Crap._

_**

* * *

**_

The noise in the confined space was incredible. Thralog's head was still painful from the ambush in the garage, and the constant storm of gunfire around him was doing nothing but making it worse. He was long past caring. All there was for him was his gun and his enemies.

They were hiding behind the crates they'd dragged into the lower level to barricade the door to the main part of the base, but they were still outnumbered seven to one – _six_, he mentally corrected himself with a wince as one idiot leaned out from the other side of the door into the garage with his shields down and took a stray bullet through his forehead. As his body hit the floor, Thralog took the opportunity to move across to the other side of the door, firing as he went. One of them, a turian, was exposed a little, and he directed his fire at him; to his delight, he saw his shields spark and fail and at least one of his bullets hit home, gouging through his armour and his side. It wasn't a bad wound, he could see that much, but as he ducked into cover again on the opposite side he heard him shout out in pain over the noise of the firefight. _That's right, you bastard. You'll get yours._

He found himself crouching behind Tomasz, who wasn't letting a little thing like a bullet wound slow him down; he was still fighting, even if he was slightly more sluggish than normal. He pushed away the dead man with a grimace – there was a flash of half-recognition as he saw what was left of the face, but he didn't remember a name to go with it – and leaned down around Tomasz's legs to provide covering fire.

There only seemed to be three of them holding the line behind their waist-high wall of crates, but they were good. They worked in unison, never letting any one of them come under sustained fire without covering him, but there _were_ only three of them, and at least one was wounded. One was a turian, he knew that, and he thought he'd caught sight of a batarian, but the other was a mystery. He hadn't got a good look at him yet; all he knew was that he was wearing a helmet of some kind.

_And we haven't got any of them yet..._

"Farik!" Thralog called over the chattering crossfire. "You have a shotgun, right?"

One of the Shadows crouched by the other side of the door looked over at him and nodded, raising the heavy block of metal he held in his hands. "Right, boss!"

"Take point!"

Farik grinned and shouldered his way out into the doorway until he was almost completely exposed, then started advancing, firing as he went. Supporting fire was almost immediate, and Thralog opened up on one of the crates as the remaining Shadows poured through the door and towards the defenders' position. From behind another crate, one of them rose, his shape obscured by the flashes and smoke the firefight was creating, and returned fire with deadly accuracy; to Thralog's left, another Shadow jerked and fell to his knees, blood splattering out behind him as his chest was shredded. He wasn't dead yet, but he would be soon, and Thralog ignored him as he gasped for help. He turned his own gun on the source of the fire, forcing the guy back down, but they were moving in fast now and the defenders knew it. There were a few seconds before they appeared again, and then they were moving, staying low and firing back as they retreated through the door to the ground level. Thralog hissed in frustration and reloaded, getting a few shots from his fresh clip off before the door slid shut again after them and the gunfire faded away.

His ears were ringing and his body bruised where a few shots had gone through his shields only to be deflected by his armour – _thanks for that, dad_ – but he was still alive, as were three of the others. Tomasz was still limping onward, his face set in a grim mask of pure determination, and there were a couple of others who looked more or less unharmed, but Farik had gone down with a dozen bullets in his torso. His shotgun was lying by Thralog's foot next to its last ejected clip, which was hissing and steaming in a pool of Farik's blood.

_Four left, and we still didn't get _one_ of them! They don't deserve to be this lucky!_

"I'm not getting through to Ganak," Tomasz said, an edge of pain in his voice. "They're jamming us."

"So we keep going," Thralog said shortly. He vaulted over one of the crates and looked back expectantly. "We've come too far to stop now. The Shadows don't run. We've got them from both sides now."

That seemed to hearten the last two, and they followed him over the crates, one pausing to extend a hand to Tomasz. The big human batted it away and hoisted himself over with a grunt of effort and pain, then nodded at Thralog, all professionalism. Thralog smiled tightly and took up a position by the door.

"They'll be waiting for us," he said. "On my mark. Three. Two. One-"

_**

* * *

**_

Garrus's head whipped round as the door to the lower level slid open behind him. Sidonis was the first through, coming backwards and providing covering fire, and Sensat followed him almost immediately. Melenis took several heavy shots to his shields as blue bolts of energy flew past him like needles, but he closed the door behind him before his barriers failed.

_If they lost that position, they can lose _that _position. We can't let them pincer us._

"Move upstairs and regroup," he said over the general channel. "Go."

_I really shouldn't sound that calm. Definitely not a healthy sign._

The stairs were a few metres behind him, and when he peeled away from the burning wreckage of the sofa to dive for the safety of the short metal barrier running up their side, he immediately started taking heavy fire. The pounding of the guns against his kinetic barriers nearly knocked him off his feet, but he was down and safe with a flashing red **8%** warning in his HUD within a couple of seconds. Erash slid in beside him as he quickly reloaded, and they started advancing up the stairs, staying low enough to avoid the worst of the incoming fire and returning some of their own to cover the others.

"Move! I'll cover you!" he heard himself saying. Sidonis was the first past him, hurdling the barrier a few steps below him and dashing up the last few stairs with his shields in tatters, and Sensat followed him seconds later. Melenis was coming slowly, firing back at the figures starting to push through the entrance and around and over the remnants of the barricade, but there was too much for even him to handle, and he bolted past Garrus to the safety of the top of the stairs at blinding speed when his shields began to fail. Garrus stayed in place, firing indiscriminately at the Shadows until his spent clip automatically ejected, then holstered his gun and drew his sniper rifle. His position was good, allowing him to fire reasonably accurately without exposing himself much at all, and he dropped one of the oncoming troopers with two shots through the visor of his helmet. The man fell, but there were more to take his place, more emerging from the thick smoke that still blanketed most of the bridge.

_Too many._

Another went down with three more shots, and two more put pay to another. Garrus was barely registering the kills now; it felt more like the endless hours of target practice every soldier did on turian patrol ships. The kill counter in his HUD ticked steadily higher, but it might as well have been the score in a video game for him. Somebody was firing down into the main level from vantage point on the other side, he could see that, but he didn't look to see who it was; that would have distracted him for a precious half-second. Instead, he just focused on one helmetless human advancing towards him, gun blazing; his shields had taken a few heavy hits in the crossfire, and Garrus only needed one shot. It ripped most of the lower half of his face off in a thick splash of blood and sent him sprawling backwards. Garrus dispassionately watched him fall, and reloaded again. He'd ducked down a little to do it, but when his head came back up, a flash of red caught his eye. His instincts outpaced his mind, and he targeted it. It was only when his finger was squeezing the trigger that he realised what the red was.

_**

* * *

**_

"-mark!"

The door slid open and Thralog burst out into the ground floor of the base, gun at his shoulder. His finger was so tight on the trigger that the tiniest movement would have been enough to pull it, but the enemies he was expecting simply weren't there. He scanned the area quickly, but all he could see were Shadows, coming in through the main entrance and moving around what looked bizarrely like a burning couch.

_Upstairs. They have to be._

He inwardly winced as the face of one man advancing towards the stairs seemed to more or less explode, but the battle rush was too strong to be cowed by the prospect of danger. He moved out towards the stairs himself, blasting away at them with suppressing fire, and was cutting across the centre of the room when a turian's head appeared above the railing. Thralog snarled and moved his fire over, but he wasn't fast enough. The barrel of a mean-looking rifle was levelled directly at him over the barrier, and he'd seen what it could do. Even worse, the last time he'd checked his shields had been ten seconds ago, and they'd been on barely 20%. Strangely, he found himself doing the mental arithmetic as he moved across the room: his shields recharged fully in forty seconds, so that would have been 25% more...

The rifle cracked, and Thralog staggered. His shields flickered and died, and an invisible krogan seemed to punch him in the stomach. The bullet didn't go through the armour, it had been slowed too much by the shields, but there would be another shot. _There's always another shot._

For the first time, Thralog understood the old cliché of time seeming to slow down. He was still moving, but the barrel was tracking him, and there was no way he could escape its sights. There was nothing he could do but keep moving and wait for the shot, but the wait seemed to stretch on for seconds on end.

Something hit him, but it wasn't the bullet. He didn't see what it was, but it was powerful enough to throw him sideways a couple of metres, and he hit the ground with a grunt. What felt like a cracked rib flared inside him, and it was agonising as he instinctively twisted around to see what had happened. As he did so, the thunderous snap of the rifle went off again.

It had been Tomasz. The big human had shoulder-charged him away from the path of the bullet and was left there in the middle of the room, hopelessly exposed. He was looking straight at Thralog as the bullet tore through his back and punched through his midriff, and scarlet blood sprayed out into the floor in front of him.

Tomasz looked down.

_Oh, no, no, no..._

The next shot went between his shoulder blades and emerged from the centre of his chest, taking most of the inside with it.

Tomasz wobbled, collapsed to his knees. Looked up again, his face totally blank, as if he simply didn't comprehend what was happening.

_No! You can't! It's not _fair!

Blood was streaming down the front of his armour, running down the cracks and dripping onto the growing pool beneath him. He was still looking at Thralog, but the light in his eyes had already gone out by the time the third bullet blew his brains out through his forehead.

Thralog stood stock still for an instant, his mind absolutely, perfectly blank. Then he saw the barrel of that rifle swinging towards him again as Tomasz's body fell limply to the floor, and he moved, sprinting to his left to take cover in the kitchen and firing as he went. The other survivors were following him, he saw, seven of them, and they were all firing as they came; the rifle wavered a second and then withdrew under the barrage, and Thralog caught a glimpse of the figure behind it abandoning his position and racing up the stairs to safety. He tried to hate him. Couldn' was nothing left to feel.

Thralog moved around behind the table and crouched down to brace his shoulder against it, then heaved up. The table crashed over, leaving plates shattering and cutlery skittering across the floor, and came to rest on its side. He ducked down behind it and reloaded as the rest of the Shadows came in. One of them fell to the crossfire from up above as he ran, exposed, across the centre of the room. Thralog watched emotionlessly as blood exploded from his chest and his legs gave out, sending another corpse sprawling to the floor.

_Six. Just six. With me, seven._

_Is this it?_

_Is this all we are?_

_Ganak. Kan'dret. Torinn. Gone._

_Tomasz. Gone._

_Dad. Gone._

_I could run. Escape by the front entrance, or head back to the garage, take a car. But for what? What's left? If we'd gone when we had the chance, we could have started again. It would have been hard, but we could have done it. Now... there's nothing left. The Shadows die tonight, whether or not I live. One last dance, and it's all gone. Everything we did, everything we were... gone, like dust in the wind._

He became aware of the group crowded around him, using the table as cover. They were still firing back at the enemies on the upper level, but he could see anxious eyes flicking to him. Looking for guidance.

_Guidance I don't have. This is what happens when you listen to my guidance. You fight, and you die._

…

_Then that's what we'll do._

He tried to speak, realised his throat was dry. Coughed once, twice.

_And what do I say? How do I tell them that I'm ordering them to their deaths?_

_I don't._

"There's only a few of them," he said, and he noted, with a dash of bitter, dark irony, that the calmly authoritative tone of his voice wasn't his, but his father's. "There's seven of us. We can take them. The Shadows don't run."

_But not because we don't want to. It's because there's nowhere left to run._

He got nods of agreement, whether genuine or not.

"Any heavy armament?"

"I've got a few grenades left," one said. _Raktol_, his memory spat up.

"Good. Wait here," Thralog said, and bolted. He was headed towards the main entrance, keeping along one wall to minimise his exposure, and he got past the line of fire unscathed. He slowed, crouched. Something had caught his eye; one of the fallen had been packing a flamethrower – as he turned him over, he saw the ruins of a bullet-torn face, smelled the thick, heady odour of mixed blood and brains – and Thralog set to work unstrapping the tank from him, ignoring the stench. It took him twenty seconds or so to rip it free and haul it over his own back.

He took the hose in both hands, then sprinted back across the room. A few shots caught him, nothing strong enough to get through his shields. He slid in behind the table again.

"OK, boys," he said, and forced a smile. _I wonder if they actually think they have a chance? _"Let's show them what the Shadows are made of."

He didn't wait for a response. The tank was heavy on his back, slowing him and making his movements clumsy, but that didn't matter; he ran, all of the pain forgotten and ignored, and charged up the stairs. Bullets pinged all around him, but they all seemed to miraculously miss. Footsteps behind him told him that the survivors were following him, but he didn't look back. He kept his eyes straight ahead as he rounded the corner and the hose in his hands belched flame and death.

_Perhaps I can take one or two of you with me._

_**

* * *

**_

"Fuck, he's got a damn flamer!" Sidonis snarled, dodging back around the corner as fire roared down the corridor towards them. "I want one!"

"Maybe for your name day," Garrus said. He'd switched back to his assault rifle, his sniper lying discarded at his feet, and he was firing at the figures pounding up the stairs from their makeshift cover, but they weren't going without a fight; several of them were returning fire, and he could only take a few shots, dropping one of them, before he was forced down while his shields recharged. Sensat was doing the same, but the others were all still up and firing, their guns chattering and rattling away too damn close to his ears for comfort.

"Oh, he felt that," Sidonis said, dropping down into cover with a savage grin on his face. "Try walking on that, asshole."

Another blast of fire emerged through the door, and Garrus shouldered his way past Sidonis and Erash and fired blindly around the corner. The corridor beyond it was narrow, and he was confident that he was at least going to hit _something_, but he'd gone through barely a third of his clip before that fiery breath started up again, closer than before. It was painfully hot, and flames licked against the wall directly ahead of the door.

"Get the flamer!" he called back to the others. "We need to-"

"DOWN!" Erash shouted suddenly, throwing himself flat. Garrus was whirling around at the clinking sound he'd heard behind him even before he registered what Erash had said, and he came face to face with a smooth grey metal sphere, about six or seven centimetres across. It had been thrown through the door and had bounced off two walls before hitting the ground.

It was now rolling towards him.

_This... is not good._

He turned again, started to run. Going flat wasn't an option any more, the grenade would rip him to shreds at that range. He kept his head down, hoping his armour would protect him from the worst of it, and then suddenly flew.

He didn't even hear the explosion, or feel its heat. Instead, he was simply picked up and casually thrown by the blast, and the world twisted and writhed wildly around him as he cartwheeled through the air. For a moment, he imagined he could hear someone shouting his name, but then he hit something. Then he hit something else. Then something else hit him.

His arms had automatically folded themselves protectively around his head as he'd flown, and he was surprised to find that he wasn't actually badly hurt. His lungs felt rather like they'd been used as punching bags for a few hours, but they were still more or less in working order, and he gasped in air as he struggled up. It took him a moment to work out what had happened; he'd been hurled clean over the edge of the upper level and had hit a cabinet on the main floor, coming to rest near the foot of the stairs. Its doors had been smashed open by the impact, and he pushed aside some mysterious mechanical equipment before a familiar sharp smell hit his nostrils.

He looked down and saw red. Red sand was everywhere, a kilogram or so of the stuff spilling from a broken plastic wrapping around his knees. A few more bags had fallen intact nearby, and he picked one up, weighed it in his hands.

_Pure?_

He was still slightly dazed from the grenade, and it took the throaty howl of the flamethrower to remind him that he was still in the middle of a firefight. Looking up the stairs, he could see several bodies, at least four of them, but the upper level was still glowing orange and that flamer was still blasting away.

His gun was gone, he didn't know where. He started to reach for one of the discarded ones, then paused for thought. _You shoot the tank by mistake, and that's an explosion you're not going to survive... you need something else, something like-_

His eyes flicked down to the heavy bag of red sand in his hands.

_...that._

_**

* * *

**_

Thralog rounded the corner and immediately squeezed the trigger again, dousing the room ahead of him with fire. The defenders had already take cover, one of them following his own lead and overturning a table as cover while others crouched behind whatever furniture they could find, but they'd reached a dead end. _Nowhere to run for any of us. Fitting._

He stepped forward, never letting his finger waver. His indicator told him he had enough ammunition left for forty-five seconds of continuous fire, more than enough to incinerate even the toughest krogan. He'd burn his way through the room, and they'd all die.

It didn't even feel like revenge any more. That implied an emotional connection, and he had none left. There was nothing inside him at all, nothing driving him other than the fact that he'd come too far to stop now.

_I've got no reason to kill them. No reason at all. What difference does a few more bodies make? What difference does any of it make?_

The room in front of him was on fire now. The sofas had caught already, burning brightly, and thick, choking black smoke was filling the air above him. Breathing didn't seem as important as it once had, so he pressed on. Took a few more steps forward. Swept the hose left to right, right to left. The heat was tremendous now even behind the jet of flame, but that wasn't important either.

_Not long now. Nowhere to run. Nothing left._

A few more steps. Someone tried to return fire, but it was blind and wild, and he quickly forced them back into cover with a sweep of hellfire. Another step.

Somebody tapped him on the shoulder.

Instinctive surprise took over, and his blood-slick finger slipped from the trigger as he turned. The fire spluttered once, then died.

There was a turian facing him. He had little doubt that it was the same one who had been talking to him earlier; no evidence, but little doubt all the same. One last time, he tried to feel hatred for him.

_Nothing. Nothing left._

The turian was in the middle of swinging something at him. Thralog watched it curiously as it neared his face, then mentally nodded._ Of course._

It him him full in the face and burst. Millions upon millions of tiny grains of pure red sand cascaded over his face, poured into his mouth, up his nose, filled all four of his eyes. He staggered back, coughing, choking, but the drug worked fast. His blood turned to fire inside him, sending unbearable heat powering through him. His vision had turned red.

Slowly, he brought his hands up to his face, the flamethrower discarded. He could just about make them out through the haze. They were twitching in front of his eyes, and as he watched the twitch became a shudder, a tremor. Tiny curls of biotic energy started popping around his fingers like bubbles, tiny blue sparks that flickered for a moment and vanished, and then the full force of the sand hit him.

His feet lifted up a couple of centimetres from the floor as the biotic power, a thousand times stronger than safe use of red sand would grant, enveloped his entire body. An intense blue glow seemed to start up around him, and then he felt a sharp burst of pain inside him.

He knew this, he realised. The dangers of overdosing on red sand were well enough known around Omega, and especially among the dealers. The biotic energy wouldn't be controllable. It would penetrate through every membrane in his body, and the effects would be the same everywhere. Those bubbles of energy popping around his fingers were safe because they were on the outside. Inside him, dozens more were starting to form and fade, and every one of them tore apart another piece of his body as it grew.

The pain was incredible now, as if his body was being eaten away from the inside. In fact, it was.

_Nothing left..._

His vision disappeared as hundreds of minute biotic reactions tore apart the tissue of his eyes, then all feeling vanished with it as his central nervous system began to disintegrate. He was only conscious for a few seconds more, and then everything went blank.

_**

* * *

**_

The batarian's body collapsed to the floor as the biotic effect died, mercifully face down. Blood ran from every orifice, draining away into a rapidly growing pool.

Garrus poked it with his foot, then looked up at the burning room. Slowly, the others emerged; Melenis had taken cover behind one of the flaming sofas, which he kicked out of the way in a cloud of sparks and smoke, while Sidonis had been crouched behind a bunk bed on the wall. Erash and Sensat cautiously came out of hiding from behind an overturned table.

There was a long moment of silence as they carefully picked their way around the flaming furniture, until finally they were all at the more intact end of the room.

_All alive, all intact. Not a bad score, by my reckoning._

"I think," he said eventually, "that we may need to redecorate."


	28. Sanctuary: Epilogue

**SANCTUARY**

**EPILOGUE**

* * *

The streets of Kima District were alive as Butler made his way through them. He wasn't a big man, and Kima seemed be crowded even for Omega; he was being pushed and shouldered and buffeted by the sway of the crowds, the smell of a dozen species' sweat was overpowering, and it wasn't helped by the sour stench blasting out from an open-fronted turian eatery on one side of the street. Everywhere around him people were chattering away, far too many of them for his translator to handle, and some of them weren't even speaking languages it understood. But worst of all, it was _hot_.

He'd deliberately dressed in a non-threatening way that night. It had been a careful choice: he'd wanted something that marked him out as a definite non-threat, so he carried no gun, wore no armour – but that carried its own risks in any city, let alone Omega, so he'd tried to make himself look like he wasn't worth harassing or mugging. This had mostly amounted to digging out his old tracksuit and shaking out a few grains of sand that had stayed with him from the shores of Lake Michigan nine years ago, but on Omega there were always people ready to hurt you no matter who you were. The Blue Suns were in command of Kima at the moment, so there was at least a semblance of order around the place, but an incautious moment of eye contact with a passing batarian could very easily make his life very difficult very quickly._And I don't think a fifteen-year-old yellow belt in Tae Kwon Do will prove much help there._

Normally, he'd listen to music to block out the crowds, something he'd done since he'd been given a cheap old omnitool on his sixth birthday and something that had probably preserved his sanity in the breathless, airless Chicago megalopolis, but today was different. Today, he had his best encryption protecting a direct line to Nalah back at their apartment, and if he focused he could just about hear her breathing in the background. Something in him badly wanted to hear her voice, despite the fact that they'd spoken less than five minutes ago, and he ducked into a slightly less crowded side alley for a moment.

"What's up?" Nalah said.

Butler grinned, and wiped a sleeve across a sweaty forehead. "I still don't know how you do that."

"Do what?" Nalah said innocently.

"You know what I mean. You answer before I ask."

"Don't underestimate a woman's intuition, Mike."

"You're not secretly an asari or anything?"

Nalah chuckled. "I wish. Anyway, what's up?"

Butler could picture her as perfectly as if it had been a video call: she'd sitting hunched over her terminal, her posture as terrible as ever, dark hair tied back and the light of the screen playing over light brown skin-

"Mike. You're doing it again."

Butler started guiltily and cleared his throat. "Yes, dear. Sorry, dear."

"I'm your wife now. You don't _need_ to fantasise about me any more."

"Yes, dear. Sorry, dear."

"Smooth talker," Nalah murmured. "Promise me something, Mike."

"Anything."

"Don't get yourself killed."

Butler ran a hand through his hair and breathed in slowly. When he brought his hand down, a couple of hairs came with it, their natural reddish-brown fading away to grey around the midsection. He looked at them for a moment. _It would be easy enough to repair the greying... but that's lying to yourself. Everyone ages._

"Believe me, I'll try," he said, "but I can't promise what's not in my hands."

Nalah sighed. "I was afraid you'd say that."

"I have to do this, Nalah. You know that."

"You don't have to do anything."

"They're making a difference," Butler said quietly. "It's been nine years since we came here, and they're the only ones I've ever seen change anything. I want to help people, not kill them."

"You've never killed anybody!" Nalah said, sounding exasperated. _As well she might. As far as she knows, I haven't._

"But I've helped. I enabled."

"It was your job. Somebody else would have done it if you hadn't."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Butler said tersely. "Even if the amount of blood doesn't change whether I'm there or not, it's still on my hands."

"...I'm not going to change your mind, am I?" Nalah said dejectedly.

"I'm sorry."

"Will you at least promise to be careful?"

"Aren't I always?"

"Promise."

"I promise," Butler said solemnly.

"Good."

"I should have done this years ago, Nalah. I've just been too much of a damn coward to do anything about this place myself."

"Nobody can fix Omega."

"I never even tried. I just sat there and helped make things worse."

"You made things better for us," Nalah reassured him. "We had nothing when we came here. You took the work you had to."

"Maybe, but now I'm doing the same again," Butler said firmly. "I'm not changing my mind."

"And what if you die?" Nalah said softly, and Butler shuddered at the muted pain in her voice. "You don't know anything about them. What if they decide they don't want you, and that you're too much of a risk to leave alive?"

"That's not who they are. I monitored their transmissions all night, and everything I heard suggested they weren't professional, or in it for money or power or anything like that. They're doing it because it's right."

"They're killers too."

"There are problems that can't be solved without death."

"Mike..."

Nalah's voice was painfully plaintive, but Butler forced himself to resist.

"I'm sorry," he repeated, and meant it. "I won't kill anyone, I promise. That's not who I am."

_Liar._

"...it's your choice," Nalah said finally. "I can't stop you. Just... just... I love you, Mike."

"I know. I love you too."

"Just come back alive."

There was silence on the line. Butler leaned back against the wall and looked up, blinking sweat from his eyes. Omega's skyline was just about visible through the slim opening running down the ceiling of the street, all ominous dark shapes against the permanent orange twilight. He watched it idly for a moment, then unpeeled himself from the wall and headed back into the throng.

His destination was only a couple of blocks away, and it didn't take him long to get there even with the heavy press of the crowd. He made sure not to make eye contact with anybody, especially not batarians; they had a habit of taking it as a direct challenge even more than usual on Omega, and he definitely didn't want to tangle with them. Large crowds were usually fairly safe – it was the side alleys and winding dead-end streets that littered the city that were the real killing grounds – but unarmed and unarmoured, he felt naked. He never used the gun he normally carried, but he grimly understood that being unarmed on Omega was something like taping a 'Kick me' sign to your back in middle school.

Eventually, he rounded one last corner, the crowd thinning out as he left the local market area and headed further into residential zones. A lot of the area was actually deserted, and he had an idea why; the leadership of the Shadows had been concentrated around this area, and with them out of the picture there were suddenly a lot of empty buildings. Furthermore, the firefight two nights ago had been particularly fierce, and people were staying away from the area out of the traditional Omega policy of 'being killed is bad'. The story he'd heard most often was somewhat like the right one: the Shadows had lost the final battle of a gang war, although details varied in the telling. Some were saying they'd fought the Blue Suns, but that was patently ridiculous; most of the smarter sources were pointing at one of the other small gangs, often the Talons or Gold Stone. There was general agreement that the Shadows had been attacking someone, which explained why they were out of their traditional operating area; their base's location had always been their best-kept secret, and rumour had it that a business associate of theirs had betrayed them and ambushed them at his house. It didn't matter that it was a lie; the people of Omega fervently believed that lies were more fun.

And yet despite all the lies and wild stories and rumour flying around, Butler had heard a few people talk about some crazy group of vigilantes taking down the Shadows all by themselves. He'd discreetly listened in bars and clubs as people mocked the idea that an organisation like the Shadows could be brought down by a handful of people like that, but he'd watched their faces, and he'd seen them wondering about all the assassinations and midnight ambushes in Shadows territory. There were suspicions, and that was enough. The story seemed to have spread a little over the last day, and a few local extranet circles had picked up on it, but it was still a minority opinion. _And maybe that will change. It's got all the classic ingredients of a great urban legend: the ragged bunch of underdogs, striking back at the oppressors of the people in the name of justice and winning unlikely victories... and the name. The name is what spreads fastest, and it translates well into pretty much every common language. That's the key, really. What you do doesn't matter anywhere near as much to people as how you look when you do it._

There was nobody in sight when Butler headed out into what passed for the open air. It made sense, to an extent; the only thing through here were a couple of dead ends and a private building, but he'd expected there to be at least a few people hanging about. There were none. _Afraid? _he wondered. _Or perhaps they simply don't care enough to waste their time here._

The bridge stretched in front of him, long and foreboding. Deep scratches were dug across its surface and in places the metal was blackened from extreme heat, presumably remnants of the weaponised trucks he'd heard them planning to use. The low barriers along the sides of the bridge were smashed to pieces in places, but the rubble had been cleared away, and there wasn't a single body in sight. _Obviously. Bodies attract attention, and they clearly don't want that._

The windows of the building were empty from what he could see, but he still had the definite sense that he was being watched as he started to slowly make his way across the bridge. He kept his hands palm-up at chest height as he went, trying to give no reason whatsoever for anyone watching to think he was a threat. His heartbeat had quickened and sweat was staining the armpits of his top, but there was no sniper's bullet to greet him. He just kept walking, keeping his eyes fixed on the entrance.

_Oh, God. I'm actually doing this._

It seemed to take him an age to get there. He focused on the sound of Nalah's breathing, just about audible in his minute ear implant, and it calmed him a little, reminding him of times when he'd wake up before her and watch her sleep beside him for a while. He deliberately slowed his own breathing as he approached the entrance, then his heart leapt into his mouth as he someone stepped out into sight.

When he realised it was a volus, there was some relief, but also some doubt: _was the volus with them? I didn't hear anyone who sounded like a volus over the line..._

"I don't know you, Earth-clan. _(hkk) _What are you doing at my house?" the volus said, in a decidedly unwelcoming voice.

Butler licked his lips nervously, weighing up his options. He decided to go for it, and said: "I wonder if the Shadows asked you the same question."

The volus looked expressionlessly at him. "What do you want?" he said.

The question's bluntness made Butler blink. "I'm just here to talk. I'm not armed," he said. "I know what happened here two days ago... and I'd like to speak with Garrus."

He didn't know what kind of reaction he'd been expecting from the name-drop, but whatever it was, the volus's mask hid it from him.

"Indeed?" the volus replied. "A moment, please." Under the skin of his neck, Butler felt a tiny, almost imperceptible vibration as the implant he'd installed to warn him about secret, encrypted calls being made in his vicinity went off. Somebody was talking to the volus, presumably Garrus, but Butler couldn't hack into it without conspicuously using his omnitool. Instead, he had to wait five or six agonising seconds as Nalah received the signal from his implant and remotely operated his omnitool to listen in on the conversation.

"-firmed he's not armed? And alone?" a turian voice said on the line.

"I have," the volus said, still looking at Butler. _Scanning devices built into the suit, perhaps?_

"...then let him in. If he looks at you funny, drop him."

"Shit," Nalah muttered in Butler's ear.

"Come inside," the volus said to Butler, gesturing into the building. Butler swallowed, his throat dry, and stepped forward.

_Wait. Is it my imagination, or has he stopped breathing?_

The ground floor of the building was a sparse, smoke-smelling mess. Every surface was pitted with bullet marks, spent thermal clips, what looked like ashes, and traces of bloodstains were all over the floor, and there were several large black streaks that told Butler someone had repeatedly fired a flamethrower inside. An empty table lay to his left, where a batarian was sitting in patched overalls, working on some sort of device Butler didn't recognise. He glanced up as he came in, but gave Butler nothing more than a passing inspection before returning to his work. To his right, a salarian was lying back on a sofa, reading something on his omnitool. He didn't seem to care a great deal about Butler either.

"I'm told you wanted to speak to me," a turian said, coming down the stairs at the back of the main floor. "Well, here I am."

He was the only one of them in armour, a heavy-looking blue set with more than enough battle scars to last a lifetime; tattoos in the same blue adorned his face in the usual turian style, and a similarly-coloured visor was in place over one eye. Mean-looking rifles hung from his back and a heavy pistol was strapped to his side, but his hands were empty. _That's good. That means he's probably not thinking of killing me right now._

"You're Garrus, right?" Butler said.

"Last time I checked," the turian said, shrugging. He reached the bottom of the stairs and headed towards Butler. "I'm interested as to how you know my name. _Very_ interested."

_Uh-oh. That doesn't sound good._

"Not 'tie you to a chair and beat you senseless' interested, though," Garrus said quickly, as if he'd seen the concern on Butler's face. "Well, not unless we really want to."

Butler blinked. _This is... not what I was expecting._ "I... was listening in," he said. "Two nights ago, when you brought down the Shadows. I could listen to every conversation you had."

"Is that so?" Garrus said blandly. "Well, I don't think there's any point denying it now. I'm intrigued that you got through our security, though."

"I doubt that," the batarian grunted, without looking up. "There was strong encryption on the line."

"...Sensat, correct?" Butler said, gambling it would get a response. It did; the batarian's head flicked rapidly up at the mention of his name, and four sharp eyes watched Butler closely.

"Correct," he said, his voice ripe with suspicion.

"Encryption is what I do," Butler said. "I'm a communications specialist-"

"Wait, Butler?" the salarian said suddenly, sitting up. "You're Butler, right?"

That threw Butler completely off-guard, and he stared at the salarian wordlessly. He simply hadn't expected the tables to be turned on him like this, and he desperately tried to think where he might have seen the salarian before. It was impossible, of course; the only way he could tell most salarians apart was skin tone, and the greenish-brown of this one wasn't exactly unique. He didn't recognise him in the slightest.

"Friend of yours?" Garrus asked the salarian.

"Friend? No," the salarian said, and swung himself off the sofa and onto his feet. "Nothing like that. He's Eclipse. A comm specialist, like he said."

"I'm not Eclipse any more," Butler said quickly, trying to regain at least some initiative. Furthermore, he had a sneaking feeling that being part of the Eclipse wouldn't exactly go down well among these people. "I quit."

"That makes two of us," the salarian said. "It was what, three or four years now? I took part in a few missions you were attached to. Don't expect you'd remember, but a salarian never forgets a face."

"I... no, I don't remember you," Butler said feebly. Inside, he was furious at himself for letting them take control of the conversation so easily; he'd mentally rehearsed the situation a dozen times over, but he'd never conceived that anything like this would happen.

"So, it's Butler, is it?" Garrus said, and Butler turned back to him.

"Uh, yes," he said. "Mikhail Butler."

"You realise that you've put us in a difficult position by being here."

The turian's gaze was uncomfortably intense even with – or maybe because of – the visor, and Butler had to force himself to meet it evenly.

"I do," he said. "That... was my intention."

"Confident of you," Garrus said lightly. "That's quite the gamble. We've proven ourselves ready to kill. Did you really think it was wise to put us in a position where the easiest solution is killing you?"

"Wise? No," Butler said. "Right? Yes."

"Hah. If only those things overlapped more," Garrus said thoughtfully.

"In addition," Butler said, and his heart started to race even faster as he queasily contemplated how what he was about to say could go very, very badly wrong, "killing me wouldn't solve your problem."

"No man, no problem," Garrus said. "Wasn't it a human leader who said that?"

"How do you know that I'm the only one who knows about you, though?" Butler said, and blinked away a couple of drops of nervous sweat. "Isn't it possible that I'd have told someone else?"

"...well, killing you would still solve _part_ of the problem," Garrus said defensively. "Look, is this some kind of suicide by proxy or something? Are you trying to convince me to kill you?"

"No! What? No!" Butler protested. "That's not it at all!" _Argh, why is this going so badly wrong so quickly?_

The turian raised an eyebrow. _Do they even have eyebrows? They don't have hair, so logic dictates no... but I'm pretty sure he did._ "Then what? What do you want?"

"I want to join you," Butler said.

There was a long moment of silence. Butler looked at Garrus's face and saw a look of total surprise ghosting across it for a second before the turian regained control of it, and that surprised him in turn. _Surely he must have at least thought that I might want to join them... but he didn't look like it. Is that good? I hope that's good._

"I..." Garrus began uncertainly, then cleared his throat. "You want to join _us?_"

Butler nodded. "You do good work. I can help you."

"Good work," Garrus repeated. "I'm not even sure what kind of work we do, to be honest."

"I think we're sort of self-employed mercenaries, aren't we?" the salarian said.

"Or some kind of... vigilante pirate security force, possibly," Garrus said doubtfully.

The salarian grinned. "_You_ could probably bill yourself as a professional galaxy-saver."

"That would look good on business cards," Garrus said. "If we had cards. Or a business." He turned back to Butler. "Look, no offence meant, but you're not exactly trustworthy. I'd have nothing against letting you on board, but you're Eclipse, or ex-Eclipse."

"Wouldn't it have been a lot easier for me just to sell out your location to them if I'd wanted to harm you rather than coming here myself?" Butler said. "And that's only if they even knew you existed, which they don't. And even if they did know, they probably wouldn't care. And your salarian friend is ex-Eclipse, and you seem to trust him."

"Ah, but I am by nature a very trustworthy person," the salarian said, raising a finger. "Is this not true?"

"In terms of operational security, yes," the volus said, speaking for the first time in several minutes. "However, in other areas-"

"Look, I told you, I didn't know it was yours!"

"Why else would it be in my apartment?"

"This is irrelevant," Garrus said testily. "Irrelevant and stupid."

"Anyway, he's right," the salarian said. "He's on the level. Either that, or really dumb."

"True," the volus said. "His actions make no sense if he is hostile to us."

"You're the only people on Omega who are trying to change things," Butler said, and three pairs of eyes turned to him. The batarian didn't look up. "I've wanted to do that for years, but it hasn't been possible alone. I wouldn't have thought it was possible for just five people either, but you brought down the Shadows in a couple of weeks. That's real change, change people can believe in. I've heard people talking about you on the streets, and they like what you're doing. They want you to win. So do I."

"I did see some extranet chatter about us," the salarian said. "It might be we've hit a nerve somewhere. They keep coming up with names for us, as well."

"Really?" Garrus asked. "Like what?"

"Archangel," Butler said. "They call you Archangel."

"Archangel," Garrus murmured, looking into the distance for a second. "I've heard that one before."

"A human mythological figure, representing divine will," the volus said. "An interesting choice. It seems to translate fairly well across most cultures and languages. The idea of a supernatural protector is a popular one."

"Seems like everyone in the universe has daddy issues these days," the salarian said, shrugging. "Still, there are worse names."

"True enough," Garrus said, "although it's probably not good that so many people know about us already. And it's _definitely _not good that someone already found our base."

Butler raised his hands. "Only through monitoring your comms," he said. "It was chance that I heard you. I was listening to the Shadows when they went marching out and then I heard you talking to their leader. Nobody else was listening who's got the know-how to get past your encryption."

"That sounds like a useful skill," Garrus said. "Got any other neat tricks?"

"Well, I have been maintaining an open comm line out of here this whole time," Butler said.

"Impossible," the batarian said, still not looking up. "Melenis would have caught it."

The volus nodded. "Indeed. My sensor suites are state of the art."

"Have you tried splitting the Mu-Sigma frequency interference through a low-wave triple filter and then threading it through the Kappa bands, reversing the signal at each cube of a prime number?" Butler said.

There was a long silence.

"Were those actual words he used there?" the salarian asked. "Or did I just hallucinate for a second?"

"...remarkable," the volus said, flipping through functions at what seemed like an impossible speed on his omnitool. "An entire open communication line, completely hidden by what looks like random patterns of interference. Undetectable unless you know its exact location."

"Wait, what?" the batarian snapped, and slammed a hand on the table. "Let me see that." He pulled up his own omnitool and began typing frantically, then stared at his display for a few seconds in silence.

"What's the matter, Sensat?" the salarian said diffidently. "Been out-teched?"

"This isn't possible," the batarian said flatly. "Any signal run like that would degrade after a few millimetres!"

"Unless your encoder can navigate the rogue waves in the interference," Butler said proudly. "Which mine can."

The batarian glared at him and then turned away without a word, still working at his omnitool as he retreated back into the kitchen. _Trying to work out how I did it, are you? Good luck. You'll need it._

"Well, you seem to have surprised Sensat, so I'm guessing you're as good as you say you are," Garrus said. "Who's on the other end of the line?"

Butler smiled. "My wife."

"Hello," Nalah said.

"Mrs. Butler, I presume?" Garrus said.

"_Doctor_ Butler, yes. And you're Garrus, right?" Nalah said.

"That's right."

"My husband's a good man, Garrus. If you get him killed, I'm going to kick your ass."

"Oh, I _like _her," the salarian said.

"Duly noted," Garrus said, with a faint smile. "I'll try not to."

Butler pressed a couple of buttons on his omnitool and ended the call before Nalah got around to berating him for being so stupid. It was just delaying the inevitable, but procrastination always seemed so attractive at the time.

"Sounds like a fine woman," the turian said. "I probably shouldn't get on her bad side, though."

"No," Butler agreed. "You really shouldn't."

"Well, considering my options are now rejecting you and letting you go, in which case there's a very real possibility of someone else finding us who isn't as... understand, rejecting you and killing you, in which case your wife will probably kill _me_, and recruiting you... I'm going to go for the latter," Garrus said, and held out a hand. "If you're really crazy enough to join us, then you're welcome aboard."

Butler took it and felt the turian's firm, three-fingered grasp. "Good to be here."

"There are probably some things I should explain to you," Garrus said. "Otherwise, you're going to get some nasty surprises somewhere down the line. We're not exactly a conventional-"

"Garrus, have you seen my pants?" another turian yelled from the top of the stairs. "I could have sworn I had pants at one point!"

Garrus visibly winced. "No, Sidonis, I haven't seen your damn pants!" he called back.

"Well, this is just ridiculous," the other turian said, coming downstairs. True to his word, he was wearing nothing but what looked like the turian equivalent of a vest and undershorts. "Where are all my clothes going?" Halfway down, he caught sight of Butler and stopped, squinting at him suspiciously. "Who's this guy? Are you here to kill us?"

"What? No!" Butler said. "I'm-"

"Do _you_ know where my pants are?"

"Uh, no?" Butler said weakly.

"Well, fuck," Sidonis said, and disappeared back upstairs.

"Um. It's probably safe to ignore him for now," Garrus said, looking faintly embarrassed.

"We usually do," the salarian chipped in. "Erash, by the way. The angry one with too many eyes is Sensat, and the freak is Melenis."

"The freak?" Butler said guardedly, glancing surreptitiously at the volus. _Does he mean-_

"Oh, yeah. Melenis, show him," Erash said.

"Very well," the volus said, and gained three feet in height in two seconds flat.

"Uh," Butler said.

"Yes, that was my first reaction too," Garrus said sympathetically. "You get over it."

The volus's vast body folded back into itself with a series of clanks and whirs, collapsing until the short, dumpy alien standing in front of him looked like any other example of his species. Limbs shortened and half the torso seemingly disappeared, leaving behind nothing but the usual pear-shaped body.

"You'll also never think a volus is harmless again," Erash said.

Butler blinked. "Did that just-"

"Yes," Melenis said.

"But you're-"

"Yes."

"And then you-"

"Yes."

"But now-"

"Yes."

"Well, that sorts that out," Garrus said.

"What the hell have I gotten myself into?" Butler said hollowly.

"Hey, don't say you weren't warned," the turian said, grinning. "Welcome to Archangel."


	29. An Eye For An Eye: Intersection

**MASS EFFECT: INTERREGNUM**

* * *

**AN EYE FOR AN EYE**

**ONE: INTERSECTION**

* * *

The three men stood in a doorway, out of sight of anyone who might happen to pass them on the street, and argued.

"We're doomed," Monteague said morosely. The exertion of hauling around fifteen kilos of solid armour was telling on his tall, lanky frame, and the faint orange glow of the street lighting reflected back off his shaven, sweat-slick scalp as he fixed Weaver with a baleful glare. "You're stupid and rash and insane and one day we're all going to die because of you."

"We're not going to die," Weaver snapped. "Every bloody time it's 'oh, we're doomed, there's no chance we can do this, let's go home and cower in a corner', and every _bloody_ time you're wrong."

"But the difference is that I can be wrong hundreds of times. I can only be right once, which is one more than you've ever managed."

Weaver jabbed a massive finger at Monteague's face. The two of them were about the same height, but Weaver probably weighed in at twice the mass and quite possibly twice the width. "Put a cork in it, you miserable French bastard, or I'll damn well put one there for you."

Monteague snorted. "Imbecile."

"Coward!"

"I believe the term you're searching for is 'realist'," Monteague said. "Perhaps it is a difficult concept for you, no?"

"I'll give you-" Weaver began, but the third man, who was facing away from the other two, towards the empty street, held up a hand for silence. He got it immediately.

"Weaver, stop being an jackass," he said. "Luc, stop being depressing."

"I know no other way of being," Monteague said sourly. "What else can one be in this infernal place with this great half-shaven ape breathing down my neck at every turn?"

"Half-shaven?" Weaver said suspiciously. "Is this about my beard again?"

"It's ridiculous. It looks like you glued half a dog to your face."

Weaver raised a defensive hand to his chin and ran his fingers through the sandy brown mass growing on it."At least I have enough testosterone to grow one."

"Beards do not work that way."

"What are you talking about? That exactly how beards work-"

The third man was about a foot shorter than either of them, but when he turned around, both the taller men fell silent again instantly. "_Weaver._ Stop being a jackass. _Luc_. Stop being depressing. _Both of you_. Shut the hell up."

"Come on, Chang," Weaver groused. "We've been standing here for twenty minutes. I want to kill something."

"There's a surprise," Monteague murmured.

"Can I at least kill _him_?" Weaver said. "Please?"

Chang rolled his eyes. "Yes," he said, "if you've spontaneously developed the ability to manipulate major psychic energy fields in the last few minutes. Is that something you can do?"

"No, but I can punch people very hard."

"Congratulations," Chang said drily, "but as useful a talent as that is, for the moment a biotic is more useful."

"So... can I kill him later?" Weaver said hopefully.

Chang shrugged and turned away. "We'll see."

"Ah, of course," Monteague said. "Throw me to the wolves as soon as I'm no use to you. I had forgotten what a wonderful person you are, Chang."

"Shut it, Luc."

There were a few moments of silence.

Weaver ran his fingers through his mane of thick, wavy brown hair. They came away slick with sweat. Omega was never exactly well-ventilated, and they were deep in the bowels of the dank, tightly-packed warehouse districts, _and_ his armour weighed in at thirty kilos total. He was a massive mountain of a man, but the load was damn heavy all the same.

Anyone asked to describe him would probably use the word 'big' fairly frequently. At six foot seven, he towered over pretty much everyone – but where Monteague was built like a beanpole, Weaver was built like a rugby player. That was largely because he was one, or at least had played at a semi-professional level before he'd come to Omega; his shoulders were enormously broad, his legs were the size of substantial tree-trunks, and his arms had, on at least two occasions, punched out a krogan. His beard was thick and bristling while his hair reached almost down to his shoulders, and even the gun he carried – a customised variant on the M-76 Revenant which sacrificed mobility for more power – was enormous, a great thick lump of brown metal approximately the size of a child. He was certainly cradling it like a child as they stood in the alcove, and he was very much looking forward to getting some use out of it. He'd always personally preferred to kill with his bare hands, but that just wasn't practical in firefights, much to his annoyance. _Still, maybe if we take Williams alive..._

The thought of slowly strangling Gus Williams to death was a pleasant one, and Weaver was still enjoying it thirty seconds later when Chang brought a hand to his ear and muttered an acknowledgement into his collar.

"First team's moving in," he said. He turned back to Weaver and Monteague, drawing his Vindicator, and jerked his head in the general direction of the warehouse. "Let's move."

Weaver grinned and raised his own rifle. "Some action at last."

"Don't kill Williams unless you absolutely have to," Chang said. He stepped out into the street and began heading for their destination, Weaver and Monteague falling into step behind him. "And frankly, he's more important than you right now, so if it comes down to choosing between your death and his, do me a favour and choose yours."

"I brim with encouragement," Monteague said bleakly.

"Once we've got the shipment, we can kill him, though," Weaver said. "Right?"

"Talk to Harrison," Chang said curtly. "It's his decision. Cut the chatter."

They rounded a corner in silence and headed down an empty street towards the warehouse at the other end. By Omega time, it was somewhere in the early hours of the morning, but areas like these usually had at least a few people around at any given time. _People are scared,_ Weaver thought. _What is it now, five dead here in the last week? And that's just the bodies they found..._

A splash of white paint on a building to Weaver's left caught his eye as they moved down the street; they were quickly past it, but he'd turned his head fast enough to get a good look at what it was. He'd seen the design a few times before, or variants on it, sprayed in several districts across the station. Whoever was in control of the area usually had them taken down within the day, but they kept popping up faster than they could be destroyed. The design was simple: two white wings that curved up, this one with the wings smooth and flat. Some versions made them feathery or lost the curve, but the wings were always there. About a week ago, he'd seen one with a humanoid figure painted between them, making the allegory explicit.

_Angels. Lots of little white angels._

Omega's underclass had a well-known propensity towards idolisation. Anyone they saw as an enemy of the dominating gangs, they cheered on out of sheer bloody-minded spite. This was different. Weaver had heard the name _Archangel_ all over the place in the last month or so, ever since the guy – or the team, stories differed as to exactly what Archangel was – had burst onto Omega's scene with a bang and brought down the whole Shadows. The murders and assassinations in back alleys that were Omega's stock in trade had more than doubled, and the extra bodies were universally among the station's vast criminal classes. _No wonder they loved the guy,_ Weaver thought idly. _Noble ideas never end well on Omega, though. He's attracting attention. He'll be dead in a trash compactor inside two weeks._

He disregarded it and looked ahead to the warehouse. They were close now, and the dull grey walls rose up high and ominous over them. No windows, as usual. Just one door, an old square of metal with a faint green light glowing gently at its centre.

"Wait for the signal," Chang muttered, as they took up positions on either side of it. Weaver took one side to himself, leaving Monteague and Chang on the other. "Bryan, we're in position."

There was a pause of a few seconds as Chang waited for the response.

"Ready to break some heads, Luc?" Weaver said. Monteague glanced over at him in disgust, but there was a layer of queasiness behind that. Weaver had a keen eye for faces, and he could see exactly how much the Frenchman was dreading this particular encounter.

"Shut up."

"Ready to rip them some shiny new arseho-"

"Shut _up._"

"Go," Chang said suddenly, and Weaver jammed a hand into the door control. It slid open and then they were inside, quickly advancing with guns raised.

The warehouse was relatively small, but it was still probably fifty or sixty metres from one end to the other. Much of the space in between was taken up by stacks of containers, from piles of coffin-sized boxes to the massive, ten-metre shipping crates which dominated the left side of the room, but their targets were still clear. Weaver could see six, and he was sure there were at least twice that many hidden behind various crates on the other side, but the plan had relied on the element of surprise; there was no time to head for good positions or cover, just to fire – but just as his finger closed on the trigger and his Revenant juddered in his hands, he wondered just what the full-face goggle masks they were all wearing were.

The lights went out.

"_Shit!_" Chang rasped. "Trap!"

The sudden darkness was enough to heavily disorient Weaver for a second, but he was already spinning to head for the door, to get the hell out of there as fast as possible. It was pitch-black, but there was one thing he could still see as he turned, and it made his heart sink like a stone. The faint circular light in the middle of the door had changed colour from green to red.

_Trapped._

He whirled back and opened up again. He couldn't see his targets any more, and the muzzle flash from his assault rifle didn't help. Instead, the whole of his field of vision started flickering like bad strobe lighting, and then the return fire started up. Vision became impossible, and the sound of more than a dozen guns all firing at once echoed wildly from every surface, turning the warehouse into a chaotic storm of light and noise.

_And they have some sort of vision enhancers..._

A few shots smashed against Weaver's kinetic barriers, knocking him off his stride, but he kept ploughing forward, still firing from the hip as the shake and rattle of his gun sent wild sprays of bullets screeching in the general direction of the fire coming at him. He could only see in flashes, sudden bursts of light and shadow that constantly seemed to be morphing and shifting position, but he could see enough to make out a heavy crate a few metres ahead of him, and he dived gratefully into the cover it provided, hitting the floor with enough speed and weight to knock most of the wind out of him.

"_Bugger_," he wheezed. He pushed himself up into a sitting position, his back to the crate, and ejected his thermal clip. It hissed and rolled away on the floor, blinking from red to a glaring white in the bursts of light that came with the volleys of heavy assault rifle fire screaming overhead. He had no idea where the hell Chang or Monteague had gone or if they were even still alive, but he didn't care about that any more. It was about escaping with his life, and he was damned if he could think of a way to do that when he was locked in a dark warehouse with a dozen well-equipped men trying to kill him.

He leaned over and fired around the edge of the crate, blasting away at seven hundred and fifty armour-piercing rounds per minute, but he couldn't see even one target. All there was to see was light and dark, constantly strobing on and off far faster than the eye could process as a dozen guns all fired at once, filling the air with the sharp tang of electricity and damn near deafening Weaver in the process. He grimaced and ducked back into cover as someone noticed him and sent some bullets his way, but he didn't like what he'd seen. Visibility was about three metres for him, and with the door locked...

Weaver wasn't particularly afraid of death, at least not any more. He'd dealt enough of it out (and enjoyed himself immensely while doing so) that he'd come to regard it as just another thing that happened to people from time to time. People including himself. He'd faced it down enough times to know that he wouldn't be lucky forever, and he'd still stayed in his line of work even knowing it would kill him one day. He was thirty-eight. It hadn't been such a bad run, and he didn't have any particular desire to grow much older. As long as he took a few of them with him, he supposed he could handle death. What did he have to live for except more killing?

_Then again, that's a bloody good thing to live for._

He sighed, and readied his assault rifle. A charge would leave them off-balance, at least for a while, and then he'd be close enough that he'd have a fair chance at hitting a few of them hard enough to seriously fuck them up. Then they'd return the favour, and he'd die. Probably fairly quickly. But if he could just get Williams... well, then that would be worth dying for, wouldn't it?

Weaver counted ten heartbeats, inaudible as they were over the gunfire. They were fast, but not frantic. He'd made his peace.

He rolled out of cover and sprinted headlong towards the source of the gunfire, not even bothering to stay down. His finger was clamped hard down on the trigger all the way, and blinding white sparks and bolts crashed out of his Revenant as he ran, blasting away at whoever was unlucky enough to be standing in front of him. A flash of blue jerked his head to the right in time to see one of the troopers he'd seen earlier cartwheeling wildly through the air in a bizarrely floaty way, wreathed in the telltale blue light of biotic energy, and he angled his gun up towards him. The Revenant sent a dozen bullets scorching straight through shield and armour, dicing the poor bugger's flesh like coleslaw as he sailed overhead, sending blood splattering down from fist-sized exit wounds.

_So, Monteague's still kicking. Good for him. He might as well die like a man._

Shots hammered at his shield, tearing it to shreds. He traced their fire right back at them, sending gleaming streams of bullets racing towards its source. He thought he might have heard a scream over the ear-piercing storm of gunfire, and he grinned savagely, waiting for the next shots to finish him off. His Revenant ran dry at almost exactly the same time as his shields failed, and then the shots were chewing through armour rather than evaporating into thin air. He staggered under the fusillade, but none got through for a few seconds; all he came away with were a few dozen nascent bruises on his torso as bullets whistled all around him. Luck alone was responsible for that, but he'd been riding that for years and he'd just run out of track.

One shot found a gap in his armour near the left shoulder, and drove straight through muscle and flesh before hitting bone. Agony blossomed fiery red in Weaver's shoulder, and he shouted out loud in pain, a thick guttural grunt. He'd been off-balance already, and the shot ripped away what was left; he crashed down onto the floor with all his weight on the wound. It was the worst pain he'd ever felt in his life, and he was damn grateful he was only conscious for a few seconds before blackness boiled up and overtook him.

_...at least it's an end..._

"Rise and shine, Weaver, my old chum!"

Weaver let out a heartfelt groan as he snapped back to consciousness. The pain in his shoulder had dimmed a little, but it was still utterly agonising, as if liquid metal was running in the veins down his whole left side. He couldn't move the arm, and even trying made him feel faint. Trying to open his eyes flooded them with blinding light, stabbing shards of pure pain into his skull, and he jammed them shut again.

"Always were a fucking idiot, you know that?"

_Williams._

Weaver was lying on his back, but he was sitting up barely a second later, blinking frantically. His shoulder screamed at him as he did it, but the pain was almost forgotten as his sight returned. Blood was still dribbling from the wound, but the flow had been mostly staunched by the automatic medigel application his armour had delivered to the affected area. _So, I won't die from blood loss,_he thought grimly.

The lights had come back on, and he was surrounded by the same troopers he'd been shooting at. Their masks had come off, but their guns still looked big and nasty. They were all pointing at him, and the men behind them looked rather displeased.

Straight in front of him stood Gus Williams, and even through the haze of pain Weaver could see the sneering, smug smirk of triumph on his thin lips. Williams was one of the palest people Weaver had ever seen, but he was flushed pink now and his blond curls were limp with sweat. The fight had clearly taken a lot of out him, but nowhere near enough, and just seeing a smile on that bony yet handsome face stirred a deep rage somewhere inside Weaver.

"You kept me alive just to gloat?" Weaver spat. "You pathetic little piss-stain."

"Didn't your mother ever teach you any manners?" Williams said mildly. "At least Luc had the decency to come quietly."

He gestured behind Weaver, and Weaver turned his head – even the tiny movement brought a moan of pain to his lips as his broken, bleeding shoulder shifted – to see Monteague on his knees behind him, his hands on his head as more of Williams' goons watched over him.

"Fucking coward," Weaver said bluntly. Monteague didn't answer. His eyes were glued to the floor, his shoulders quivering minutely, and Weaver recognised sheer, hopeless terror in him. He knew then that Williams had only kept him alive because the sadist in him enjoyed seeing him like that, and Weaver actually felt a stab of pity for Monteague. He knew fear like that. He'd lost the ability to feel it years ago, but he knew it all the same. _He's still young. He'd have grown out of it one day. A day we'll never see._

"The rest are dead, if you're wondering," Williams said with an effusive shrug. "But I lost two of mine, both to you, I'm sure you'll be happy to know. They had families, you know."

"Hah," Weaver said. "You think I give a shit about that?"

"No, not really," Williams conceded, and flashed him another smile. "Still, never let it be said I'm not open-minded. My men here, on the other hand... well, they look out for their friends. Unlike you. They don't like you at the moment."

Slowly, deliberately, and not a little painfully, Weaver unfolded his massive frame and clambered to his feet. Eight gun barrels followed him up. "Then they can fucking shoot me if they've got the balls," he said, and bared his teeth in what might have been a grin if it had worked hard and studied in its youth instead of murdering people in dark alleys with broken bottles. As it was, it resulted in an insane, skeletal death grimace, and a couple of the troopers training rifles on him subconsciously inched slightly away.

"Well, I'll leave that to them," Williams said, offering a dazzling grin as bright as it was cold. "Maybe I'll send what's left back to London. I'm sure your parents would appreciate it."

The mention of London brought back old memories, sending them bubbling to the surface of Weaver's mind. He saw himself and Williams walking the megacity's streets, part of the ever-growing gun-for-hire sector, remembered their near-capture and flight to Omega, remembered joining Harrison and Chang's band of mercs. He remembered how Williams had sold them all out and jumped ship, leaving them in a trap they'd lose three men fighting their way out of. He remembered the moment when he stopped thinking of him as his old friend Gus. He remembered the raw, boiling hate, and found it was still there, potent as ever. He held onto it, and looked straight into Williams' eyes. For a moment, he thought he saw a tiny flicker of instinctive fear in them. He might have imagined it, but he was damned if it hadn't felt good to see.

"Eat shit, you little rat," he said. "Someone will kill you one day soon. I'm just sorry it won't be me."

"Kill _me_?" Williams said, as if Weaver had said something utterly ridiculous. Weaver did, however, note with quiet satisfaction that his smile had grown infinitesimally smaller. "Sorry, mate. I'm an arms dealer now. I've got more power in my little finger than you have in your whole body, beard included. Do you know who I supply?" He was too into his spiel to let Weaver answer. "The Blue Suns! Vanzar! Eclipse! Even the sodding Blood Pack! I have the Pirate Queen herself paying for my wares. There's nowhere easier than Earth to smuggle high-quality guns from in all of Citadel space, and I've cornered the market on this arsehole of a station. The shipment coming in on Wednesday? It'll make me millions, and all it took to get it was a few little armed robberies. Armed robberies of arms! And it was all fucking _cheap._ God, I love the economics of scale! Nobody will even get close to me! Look what happened to you idiots! I always said Harrison was brainless. Just didn't mean it literally until now."

"How did you know we were coming?" Weaver asked, if only to answer the question he'd been turning over in his mind for a few minutes.

Williams fixed him with another ice-cold smile. "Because you're morons. Loose lips cause explosive decompression in ships, remember? You only changed your codes once after I left you lot, and you were stupid enough to transmit the new codes on the same unsecure network. I could hear everything you were saying on the station for the last eighteen months. I even fed you information _just_ so I could have you come and try to steal my shipment. I played you all along, and it looks like I _won_."

"Of course," Weaver said bitterly. "You hadn't fucked with us enough. Why else?"

"Why else indeed?" Williams said, spreading his arms wide. "I hate you, you know that? You're a thick-skulled, classless sociopath and it's doing the galaxy a favour to kill you."

"You're calling _me_ a sociopath," Weaver said disbelievingly.

"What were you going to say?" Williams said, and a harsh mocking tone entered his voice. "That 'it takes one to know one'? Something about pots and kettles? No, I don't deny it. I think you and I both know that the self is the only thing that really matters. The difference is that I used that to get ahead and better myself, and you're a common thug. Worthless. That's why you die. As for Luc, well, he's French. That's reason enough, don't you think?"

"Shit," Monteague snarled from behind Weaver, and Weaver recognised the tone of terror curdled into hopeless defiance.

"Ah, you _can_ still speak!" Williams said cheerfully, bounding joyfully past Weaver to stand over Monteague. "And the word of Cambronne, as well. Very good. What, do you think you're some sort of modern-day Napoleon, defiant to the end?"

"No," Monteague said venomously. "But I do consider _you_ a modern-day Pétain, you son of a whore."

The reference went straight over Weaver's head, but Williams chuckled lightly at it. "Of course you do. Well, I suppose that's that, more or less." He turned away and walked out of the circle of troopers, his back to Weaver. "Have fun, boys," he said, without turning back. "Just clean up once you're done. Nice knowing you, Weaver."

"Burn in hell, Williams," Weaver said, and meant it. There was no reply; maybe he'd been too far away to hear him, but Weaver somehow doubted it. Williams just didn't care.

"You killed our friends," one of the troopers said, presumably a captain of some sort. Weaver regarded him coldly as he stepped forward and slung his assault rifle over his shoulder, leaving his hands free.

"Yeah," Weaver said, and grinned leeringly at him. "Yeah, I did. I just wish I'd done it _slower_. Made them cry and beg for their life, made 'em shit themselves in terror, then killed the fuckers like they deserved. You'll get yours, sonny Jim. Maybe not from me, but one day your kids won't have a daddy any more. Like theirs."

It would have been suicide if he wasn't already a dead man, but Weaver loved the effect it had on the guy. It would only get him a slower, more agonising death, but that was a small price to pay for such an exquisitely pained look of absolute fury on the man's face, and when a heavy boot drove into his injured shoulder and sent him sprawling back on the floor, the only thing that stopped him from screaming was that sense of vicious satisfaction.

"How about _that_, motherfucker?" the trooper snarled, and sent another thundering kick straight between Weaver's legs. He blocked some of the blow with his thigh but the pain was still spectacular, and Weaver felt bile rising in his throat at the pain. His vision seemed to fade a little around the edges. He could still see the trooper clearly, and the foot came back for another kick. Weaver braced himself for the agony to increase again, but the kick never came.

The noise was a quiet snap, faintly reminiscent of someone closing an old paper ring-binder, but Weaver had spent too many years in his line of work not to recognise a gunshot when he heard one. The soldier who'd been attacking him froze mid-kick with a hole in his chest the size of Weaver's vast fist and then, almost comically, he looked down. He tried to say something, or at least it looked like it, but all that came out was blood.

Then everything went crazy. The one gunshot became a roar of them, all of them from behind Weaver, and then screams started up as well. The soldiers' bodies started hitting the floor, their guns clattering away into the pools of blood that were already forming rapidly. Every hit brought a fresh spray of blood, and some of it splashed down on Weaver's head. He cursed and wiped some of it away with his good hand, blinking furiously, but by the time he could see again the guns had all fallen silent. It had taken about five seconds.

Footsteps approached, several sets of them. He heard Monteague saying something behind him. Couldn't tell what; he might have heard the word 'Williams' in there, but all his senses were dulled by the pain. Some of the footsteps sped up – and he noted that they were odd ones, almost like the pounding of a heavy mech's feet – and several shapes dashed past him in the direction Williams had gone. He saw figures looming over him, gesturing to one another. Heard a voice, distinctively turian. He focused hard on what it was saying.

"-shoulder's fucked up to hell and back."

"I have medigel," another voice said. Salarian, or it sounded like it. "Give me room."

A couple of the figures moved away, and then the sweet anaesthetic haze of medigel started to spread through his shoulder, dulling the worst of the pain. His sight pulsed a few times and then started to return. While he'd been revelling in the bliss of actually feeling _less_ pain for once, more voices had been speaking overhead, and as his hearing cleared he was able to make out what was being said.

"-most sensitive part of the body," the salarian was saying.

"You're telling me humans have external testicles," the turian said flatly.

"Yep."

"That's fucking stupid! How did that survive evolution?"

"We can't all be metallic monstrosities like you, Sidonis."

"I still think it's stupid," the turian muttered. "I mean, _why?_"

"Because there isn't enough room inside," Weaver mumbled, and then started laughing hysterically. He could see some sceptical looks aimed at him and he knew that he had to look like a cackling nutjob to them, but the sudden emotional release as he realised that he _wasn't _about to die was sweeping through him like a tide of revitalising warm water. In fact, he felt good enough to push himself up to a sitting position again, and he took stock.

The soldiers' bodies were strewn across the floor in the same rough circle they'd been standing in earlier, and their blood carpeted it in a thick, sticky red. Its coppery tang was hanging heavy in the air.

Four men were standing around him. One was Monteague; two were the salarian and turian he'd heard talking, the salarian standing up from the squat he'd been in to tend to Weaver's wound, and another was a batarian. All of them were clad in combat armour, and all of them carried guns. _Like every fucking being on Omega._

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of another body. Its head was mangled almost beyond recognition, but not quite: he could still see that it was, or at least had been, Chang. Weaver grimaced. He'd liked Chang. And now he was dead, along with Harrison, Meckler, Dylan and Sanjay, and all that was left was Weaver and Monteague.

_Williams has to die._

That was a good thing to hold onto, he thought. The sudden euphoria of survival was quickly draining away to be replaced by that old, cancerous hate, and every iota of it was directed straight at Gus Williams. He wouldn't have exactly called his colleagues friends, but there'd been at least some respect there, and he hated Williams for killing them. Hell, he'd even have hated him for killing Monteague, as loathe as he would be to admit it. He hated him for the physical agony he was enduring, for being stupid enough to kill a copper and forcing Weaver to flee the city he'd spent all his life in, for betraying him, for convincing him to go to this bloody station in the first place. He was a big man, and he had room for a lot of hate.

But he knew that was for another time, and he painfully levered himself to his feet with his good arm. The salarian held his hands up as if to stop him.

"Whoa, whoa, watch it! I... doesn't that hurt?"

"Pain doesn't hurt," Weaver said. He had no idea where he'd heard the line. _Some old movie, probably. And I'm lying._

"By definition, I think you might be wrong there," the salarian said, shrugging, "but what do I care? Go for it, big man."

"Thanks," Weaver said, and he was vaguely surprised to find he was sincere. "Why did you do that?"

"What, help you?" the salarian said. When Weaver nodded, he continued: "You're fighting against Gus Williams. That means you're on our side at the moment."

_At the moment. Good to know._

"You know Williams?" Monteague asked. "How?"

"We picked up some signals about a weapons shipment and this warehouse," the turian said. "I'm guessing you did too. Looks like you unlucky assholes set off the trap before we got here." He frowned, and raised a hand to his ear. "OK, OK. I get it, Butler. It was difficult. Now shut up."

"Who's Butler?" Weaver asked.

"It's... not important," the turian said. "Fuck _off_, Butler. I don't care. I- what? Don't- ah, shit."

Weaver blinked blankly as the turian turned away and started walking off. He was still speaking, but apparently to somebody else.

"Look, I didn't mean it like that, Nalah, I- fine, Dr. Butler, but-"

"Ah, the wrath of Mrs Butler," the salarian said with a malicious smile. "A force of nature somewhere between weak nuclear and electromagnetism."

"...who the hell _are_ you people?" Weaver said.

"We're-" the salarian began.

"Williams escaped," another turian voice called, and Weaver's mouth tightened. He looked around to see the turian striding towards them from the other side of the warehouse, accompanied by a volus, of all things. The volus was having to trot to keep up with the turian, but it moved slightly oddly, almost mechanically. Weaver watched it curiously for a second, then turned his attention back to the turian as he approached. He was only an inch or two shorter than Weaver and lean even in his heavy-looking blue combat armour, which was the same colour as the tattoos on his face. A mean-looking rifle hung from one shoulder, and the sniper look was completed by a thin blue targeting visor across his left eye.

"No, I didn't mean that at all," the other turian said plaintively twenty feet away, but nobody except this Dr Butler was paying him any attention.

"How did he get away?" Weaver said, carefully trying to keep anger out of his voice. The turian regarded him appraisingly with calm, blue-grey eyes for a moment before responding.

"He had an aircar. I got a couple of hits on it, but..." He tailed off and shrugged. "We'll find him again. I'm sorry about your friends. We heard the gunfire, but it was all over by the time we got here."

"You saved us," Weaver said. "That's something."

"Something?" Monteague said disbelievingly. "We owe them our lives, you ungrateful ape. That's a great deal more than 'something'."

"In fairness, we didn't exactly set out to help you," the turian said, then looked around. "We should get out of here in case reinforcements turn up. We can work things out later. And you really should see a doctor." He turned to go, but stopped and turned back when Weaver spoke.

"Wait," Weaver said. He stooped down and retrieved his Revenant before he went on. The grip was slippery with his own blood. "First tell me who you are."

"Archangel," the turian said, as if it were nothing. "At least, that's what they call me."

"You're Archangel?" Monteague said incredulously. "Half of Omega is terrified of you."

"The right half, hopefully," Archangel said. "As I said: questions later. Come with us."

"Why?" Weaver said. "Why do you want us?"

Archangel waved an all-encompassing arm around. "What happened to you here a good illustration that we need all the help we can get for this, and from what we heard of your conversation, you both know him."

"Yeah," Weaver said venomously. "We know him."

"Not a fan, I take it," the turian said dryly.

Weaver smiled humourlessly. "You could say that."

"Then come with us," Archangel said, and turned. "Deliver a little payback."

_Payback. Yeah, that sounds good._ _Maybe I'll get to throttle the bastard after all._

Feeling a little more cheerful and with pleasant daydreams of murderous vengeance floating around his skull, Weaver followed.


	30. An Eye For An Eye: Interaction

**AN EYE FOR AN EYE**

**TWO: INTERACTION**

* * *

"_Proud declaration: we built this city, we built this city on rock and roll-"_

"The Spider Bar," Monteague said unenthusiastically. "My God, how I despise this place."

"Really?" Garrus said, cocking his head. "It's mostly a human bar."

"Except for all the elcor. The large, loud and above all _tuneless_ elcor. And the drinks are overpriced. It wouldn't be so bad if these sound-cancelling booths actually worked properly, but..." Monteague trailed off with a shrug. "That's life."

"True enough," Garrus said. He leaned back into the worn upholstery of the booth seat and looked out over the crowded bar. As Monteague had said, the ageing sound disruptors were temperamental at best, and even though he'd set them to a level that theoretically meant no sound could either enter or escape the booth, the music – _if you can even call it that –_ was still floating through, slightly tinnier but only a little quieter. At least it was a weekday, which cut down the number of people a little, although that didn't seem to stop the elcor from flooding there in their hordes.

He sighed and turned back to his drink. It would be the only one of the evening, not because he particularly needed to keep a clear head but rather because he was getting dangerously close to the financial point where he'd have to choose between alcohol and food. _I don't think I can face Omega with only one of those things.  
_

"...I must say, you're not what I expected," Monteague said, after a moment.

Garrus glanced up at him. They were alone in the booth for the moment; Sidonis had disappeared to the bathroom complaining of indigestion a few minutes ago and was showing no sign of returning any time soon. Garrus had a suspicion that the fact that the Spider Bar had a habit of mixing up the dextro and levo bowls of nuts with alarming regularity had something to do with it.

But for now they were alone, and Garrus made a small gesture of invitation. Monteague interested him, not least because he was a biotic; he gave the distinct impression that he was permanently at the centre of a very small rainstorm. Garrus could hardly fault him for expecting the worst, especially given that it had already happened to him two days ago, but just being around him made Garrus feel vaguely depressed. _Or maybe it's just the singing._

"It may sound a little supremacist," Monteague continued, "but I had thought Archangel would be a human. Definitely not a turian. Not that I have a problem with turians," he added hurriedly, and Garrus stifled a smile. "It's just that... every impression I've had of turians is that you like to do things by the book. Officially. The idea of a vigilante in the most lawless part of the galaxy being a turian seems... unnatural."

"To be honest," Garrus said, "you're right. Most turians wouldn't do what I do, mostly because they're better turians than I am. Why would you think Archangel would be human, though?"

"Partly the symbolism. You've seen the graffiti?"

"The wings?"

Monteague nodded. "I don't know much about alien theology, but that's a human idea. The wings of an angel. Very artistically potent."

"Some of our old myths talk about winged turians, though," Garrus said. "I mean, the image is important in our ancient cultures because we _did _have wings a few million years ago, but I'm willing to bet a fair few races have the same legend.

"The name's a human word," Monteague said. "'Archangel'. Or is that a translation? These infernal translators make it impossible to tell sometimes."

"It's a translation from a human language, but I didn't choose it," Garrus reminded him. "A human must have come up with it."

"Yes, that makes sense," Monteague said thoughtfully, staring down into his half-empty pint glass. "After all, the idea of the righteous vigilante is so... so..."

"Human," Garrus supplied, and Monteague nodded.

"Yes. We're something of a species of romantics. And idiots. Any imbecile with a gun and an ego might-"

"-think he could be the next Commander Shepard," Garrus said.

"May she rest in peace," Monteague murmured.

Garrus smiled wanly and raised a glass. "I'll drink to that."

"What are we drinking to?" Erash said, and Garrus started a little at the sudden new voice.

"...what in God's good name are you wearing?" Monteague said, looking up at Erash as if he'd walked in naked.

"You know, I'm not entirely sure," Erash admitted. Garrus moved up along the bench to let him sidle in. "You're the human. You tell me."

"Denim?" Garrus ventured. The rough blue fabric certainly looked familiar to him. _Didn't Joker wear pants like those when he was off-duty?_

"We call them 'jeans'," Monteague said. "I, uh, I don't think I've ever seen an alien wearing them."

"Well, it's a galaxy of wonders," Erash said airily. He reached inside his jacket – which, thankfully, was something which was actually made to fit a salarian – and extracted a shaped metal flask from a pocket. "Now, about that drinking?"

"I think they throw you out if you bring in drinks from outside," Garrus said. "What is that?"

"Pure ruxxia," Erash said smugly. "Enough to keep you going for a solid week. And if they think I'm paying double for their swill, they can go to hell."

"_Wistful: Why she had to go, I don't know; she wouldn't say-"_

"It never ceases to amaze me how universal the pollution of Anglophone culture is," Monteague said mournfully. "Blue jeans and the Beatles in a bar on the edge of the universe. Not even the aliens are immune."

Garrus raised an eyebrow. "Anglophone?"

"Oh, it's complicated," Monteague said, waving a hand. "Centuries of intricate pre-Contact history, rivalries and politics and wars and so on, all meaning that the dominant human language-"

"Bugger me, the beer's not cheap here," Weaver said cheerfully, pushing through the sound curtain with a pitcher of the stuff in his good hand.

"-is English," Monteague muttered darkly.

Weaver certainly looked in good spirits for a man who'd just had his friends killed and a bullet removed from his shoulder, Garrus thought, watching Monteague shift reluctantly up to allow Weaver's massive, hulking frame in. His left arm was still bound up in a sling, but it'd probably be completely healed within five or six days. They'd have to move before then, but Garrus could see a certain strange grace to Weaver's movements despite the size of the man; he wasn't the great, lumbering beast he appeared to be. There was a definite sense of carefully controlled power about him, and it struck Garrus as oddly similar to the coiled, lean energy that Monteague possessed. Biotics could make the smallest man a physical equal to the biggest; painful experience had taught him that.

They didn't like each other either. That much was painfully apparent. Weaver's meaty elbow seemed to jostle Monteague constantly whenever he moved, which most would have put down to his sheer size. Garrus saw it differently; every nudge and prod was intentional, and the tightness of Monteague's jaw told him that the animosity was very much reciprocated. _Interesting. Potentially problematic, but still interesting._

"Well," Weaver said, after he'd wiped his beard clean of leftover beer from his first swig, "here we are."

"Not all of us," Erash said. "There's still four more coming in."

"Always thought Archangel was just one guy, personally," Weaver said with a shrug. "You need this many?"

"I need as many as I can get, as long as they're good enough," Garrus said. He'd deliberately made the response a sort of challenge, and Weaver chuckled in acknowledgement.

"I take your point, right enough," he said, and nodded towards his injured arm. "Shows what you get when you're outmatched. That salarian doctor in Goku told me it's going to be a bloody week before the light goes green on the shoulder, and the shipment comes in on Wednesday. I might not be much use."

"There's more to this than just firepower," Garrus said. "You know Williams. That's what we need."

"Yeah," Weaver said, and Garrus noted the slight darkening of his brow at the mention of Williams' name. "True."

A few minutes passed in idle chatter before Melenis and Sensat arrived together and took their seats. It only reminded Garrus of the problem of how to explain Melenis to Monteague and Weaver, and he noted several quizzical looks from Weaver at the volus. _Wondering what he could possibly lend to the team, I imagine. I don't think either of them saw him in the warehouse, or, if they did, they didn't understand what was going on. _

He mentally filed it away as something to think about, but what interested him more was the way Monteague's fists, which he'd placed together on the table, seemed to tighten when he looked at Sensat. He supposed it was inevitable that at least one of the humans would be influenced by the batarian-human blood feud that dominated relations between the two species, but he'd have expected it of Weaver, not of Monteague. Butler and Sensat didn't get along any better than was necessary, but Garrus suspected that was more from the rivalry between them on the technological front. Sensat still hadn't forgiven Butler for breaking his comm security so easily, and the two had been in something of an arms race ever since, resulting in several innovations with no practical value whatsoever. Monteague was different, however; it was past rivalry and into outright hostility. The human's face was impassive, but that tightness in the jaw was back and more taut than ever.

_So, that's two sets of potential enemies to worry about. Fantastic. At least Sidonis and Erash seem to have come to an understanding, but it's still too damn complicated for me. I was never meant to manage personnel._

Garrus spent a few minutes quietly observing the conversation, staying out of it whenever possible. He gave a few answers, but for the most part he was content to sit back and watch the dynamics of it. Years of expertise with a sniper rifle and work as a C-Sec detective had given him eyes like razors, able to cut through the social wool to get straight to the meat beneath it, and he made a careful mental note of everything he saw. Weaver and Monteague very rarely spoke consecutively, although Monteague was quiet anyway. The way the conversation was directed fascinated him; Weaver and Erash were easily more talkative than the others, and it was what they said which determined the topic. Melenis and Sensat didn't often speak unless answering a question, but Erash and Weaver would talk over others and ask the questions in the first place. The two of them seemed to be developing something of a rapport, swapping anecdotes about past jobs and sharing what jokes could be effectively translated. That was good, Garrus reflected. He had a feeling that – the usual caveats about whether they were going to survive the week aside – Weaver and Monteague would end up signing on with him, a prospect that filled him with a deep sense of dread at the personal responsibility it would inevitably entail for him. Integration would be key, and while Butler had settled in quickly in a non-combat role, adjusting tactics for another heavy hitter and a biotic would be a pain in the ass.

_Oh, hell. I'm thinking like a leader again. Damn it. I don't want to be a leader. I just want to be the handsome, stone-cold sniper._

_Well, no reason I can't still be that as well._

Butler arrived a few minutes later, and Garrus was quietly thankful that his wife wasn't with him. She scared him. Butler hadn't actually met Monteague and Weaver in the flesh yet, and Garrus autopiloted his way through a round of introductions as he watched the way the three humans looked at each other. From what he'd gathered, they all hailed from different cultural backgrounds, but Butler seemed to be fairly amicable with both. Garrus made a mental note to work out exactly what the cultural relations in play were all about at some point, but he was interrupted when Sidonis finally arrived back from the bathroom.

"Remind me never to come here again," he said.

"Seconded," Erash said.

"Thirded," Butler and Monteague said simultaneously.

"OK, OK, quiet down," Garrus said, and to his surprise, they did. Seven pairs of eyes turned his way, and a small pit opened up in the bottom of his stomach. _Is it too late to go solo again? Sure, I got my ass kicked all the time, but at least I never had to worry about anyone's ass but my own. Eight asses is too many for one man._

"First, situation recap," he continued, after a moment. "Melenis, you've been doing some research?"

The volus nodded from the other side of the table and inputted a few quick commands into his omni-tool. In the background, yet another song had started up, and a round of cheers and applause indicated that it was a popular choice as the alleged singer began.

"_Infatuated ode: She's got a smile that it seems to me reminds me of childhood memories-_"

Melenis's omni-tool flickered for a second, then started a projection up. It was in full colour and near-perfect 3D detail; if not for the fact that it was only a foot tall, Garrus could easily have mistaken the image for the real man it showed. The human was of medium height and build, wearing a generic suit and distinguished by a mop of fair, curly hair. Weaver hissed under his breath at the sight of it, and a glance up at Monteague showed another faint grimace of antipathy.

"Augustus Williams," Melenis said, in clear, clipped tones. _Sounds like the lecturers at the Academy._ "Better known as Gus Williams. Born in the London conurbation on Earth, where he remains wanted for the murder of a Greater Metropolitan Police Service constable and numerous lesser crimes. A relative newcomer to the Omega criminal world, he arrived on the station between two and three years ago-"

"Two years, eight months, ten days," Weaver said.

There was a moment's silence as the big human wiped some stray flecks of beer from his beard. When he realised he'd suddenly become the focus of attention, he glared back at them. "The hell are you looking at?"

"Indeed," Melenis said smoothly, neatly breaking the awkwardness of the moment. "He arrived with one Weaver, first name unknown, and joined a mercenary group under the command of one Ravi Harrison. Approximately eighteen months ago, he betrayed the group and stole a freighter of weapons they had intended to claim from a batarian terrorist group. He used this initial capital and his old connections on Earth to create a major weapon smuggling operation, one which supplies almost every group on Omega to at least some extent."

He entered one more command, and the hologram switched to a floating depiction of some kind of large cargo ship.

"This is the MSV _Starfucker-_"

Butler choked on his beer at that, spluttering about half of it down his front.

"What," Garrus said flatly.

"Why the hell isn't our ship called something like that?" Erash demanded. In the background, Butler was still coughing and trying futilely to dab away some of his spilt beer, much to the apparent amusement of Sidonis.

"I believe Williams named the ship personally," Melenis said dryly. "There are no naming standards applied to civilian vessels."

"Is this actually true?" Garrus asked, looking around. "It seems like it's one of those things that's... not true."

"A falsehood," Sensat said.

"Yes, that."

"Oh, it's true," Weaver said. "The son of a whore always thought he had a good sense of humour."

"Clearly, he does," Erash said. "Seriously, I want to call our ship that."

"No," Garrus said firmly.

"Well, it doesn't have to be that," Erash said, sounding affronted. "I mean, it could be something like-"

"No."

"Just let me-"

"No!"

"-_Thunderfuck-_"

Garrus let his mouth hang uselessly for a couple of seconds before he pulled himself together and interrupted Erash, who, horrifyingly, barely seemed to be getting up to speed. "What the hell does that even- no, please don't answer that. Just... just stop talking. Now. Please."

"I think it's good that we consider ideas carefully and thoughtfully as a group," Erash said.

"As do I," Garrus replied. "In all cases but this one."

Erash waved a finger at him. "You'll regret this."

"No," Garrus said wearily. "I really won't."

"Actually, now that I think about it," Butler said thoughtfully, still dabbing beer off himself with the sleeve of his jacket, "I kind of like _Thunderfuck._"

"I will shoot the next person who says that word or anything like it," Garrus said. He reached down and drew the small, clip-free pistol he always kept at his side when in civilian clothes, then laid it on the table in front of him. "I am absolutely not kidding."

Five seconds of silence passed, then he withdrew it.

"Good," he said, tucking it back into its holster. "Just so we're clear."

"...at any rate," Melenis said, "the... vessel in question is the single largest shipment Williams has ever handled. It represents months of work, and there is heavy investment from Aria as well as the big three mercenary corporations. I believe the shipment contains at least five gunships as well as numerous mechs and high-quality, high-powered convential armaments, all adding up to the largest weapons shipment Omega has processed since the Conflict, six hundred years ago. It represents a significant boost in fighting capability to every major power on the station, and selling that cargo will make Williams extremely rich. Losing it will ruin him."

"And piss off a whole lot of people," Weaver said, with some relish.

"We _do_ seem to have a certain talent at that," Garrus mused.

"We should consider the psychological effect," Sensat said. "Every merc on the station is on edge because of Archangel, but at the moment we're still seen as small-time despite the Shadows. If, however, word gets around that Archangel brought down this shipment..."

He left the sentence hanging invitingly in the air, and it was impossible to resist following the idea through. _I don't like having to think about propaganda, but if we want to have any kind of significant effect, we'll need to make a splash. The Shadows weren't part of the higher echelons of the power structure here, but if we take this shipment, then we've seriously upset most of the big boys. That's dangerous... but it's what we want. Right?_

Garrus glanced around the table to see similarly contemplative expressions, remarkably similar despite the multiple species they were spread across. _They're all thinking the same thing. 'Is it worth it?'_

_Well, most of them. I think Weaver just wants to kill something._

"The situation is not easy," Melenis said eventually, breaking the reverie. "The _Starfucker_ is currently located on Illium, taking on the final part of the shipment. From there, it will proceed directly to Omega. We know it will arrive here between thirty and forty-eight hours from now, and we can predict a rough arc of its likely entry vector to the Omega system based on the Dirati Curve of the ship class, but we cannot know more than that before it gets here."

"And we have to take it in space," Erash said. "A ground attack on something like that is suicide, and not the fun not-actually-suicide kind of suicide. We will literally die. Violently."

"Good to know," Monteague said dryly.

"Is that even possible, though?" Butler asked. "We'd have to get lucky with predicting its vector to have a chance of attacking quickly enough to keep surprise on our side. If we don't get lucky, best case scenario is that the shipment gets through with maybe a little damage and we survive. Worst case scenario, we get dead."

"I don't like it," Sidonis said. "I don't like it at all."

"And even if we bring it down, Williams is still out there," Weaver put in. "He has to die."

Garrus raised his hands for silence, and the objections trailed off. He waited until he was sure he had their full attention, then leaned forwards and laid his hands flat on the table. "We have a way around these problems. Have a little faith."

"You'd need to track the ship straight from Illium just to get its vector," Butler said doubtfully. "That's expensive work."

Garrus's mandibles twitched into a thin smile. "Well, we're owed a favour or two."

"Ah!" Sidonis exclaimed, slapping the table with one hand. "Her! I didn't even think of that."

"Not surprising," Erash muttered.

Sidonis turned a filthy look on him. "Go fuck yourself."

"I don't need to. Enjoy being controlled by your primitive sex drive."

"Enjoy only living for forty years," Sidonis retorted.

Garrus raised his hands. "Children, please. Grown-ups are talking."

"But-" Sidonis began.

"_Shut up,_" Garrus said. "Melenis, make the call."

"Who are we calling?" Butler asked.

"A... friend," Garrus said, not entirely sure that the word 'friend' was appropriate. "She can help us."

"No doubt," Erash said, steepling his fingers, "but the question is whether she _will_."

Melenis's hologram turned into a circular, ring-shaped wall about a foot high, projected into the middle of the table so that every position around it had an equal view of it. It wasn't displaying anything other than a simple orange screen with the word **[CALLING...] **in the middle of it yet, but it was still an impressive feat of light projection even for a military-grade omnitool. Garrus had seen it before dozens of times, but the things Melenis could do when equipped with Sensat's tech could still send chills running through him.

"She owes us big time," Sidonis said. "It's not like she's going to just tell us to fuck off."

The orange screen evaporated, replaced by a slightly grainy view of a scowling asari sitting at a desk in front of the unmistakeable Illium skyline.

"Hello, Vunas," Garrus said. "We-"

"Fuck off," Vunas said, and stabbed a finger at her omnitool. The screen froze, then went back to blank orange.

_Well. That's annoying._

"She seems nice," Monteague murmured.

"I stand corrected," Sidonis said, shrugging. "Ungrateful bitch."

"Do we have a Plan B?" Butler asked. "Or does our entire strategy here consist of calling women who apparently hate us?"

"Call her again," Garrus demanded. "Butler, see if you can prevent her from losing the call."

"What, you're asking if I can stop her from manually disconnecting on her end?" Butler said, sounding as if he'd been asked to win an eating contest with a thresher maw.

Garrus cleared his throat. "Well... can you?"

"I'm a genius, Garrus," Butler said patiently, "not a wizard. Nobody can do that."

"Actually," Sensat said, in a voice oozing with smugness, "I can."

"Oh, sure," Butler said, rolling his eyes. "Like hell you can."

"When I gave her the data, I included a minor worm," Sensat said. "It should have infected her omnitool when she uploaded the files, and that means I can stop her from manually disconnecting."

"Hey, that's cheating!" Butler complained. He sat back and folded his arms. "I refuse to accept the legitimacy of this."

"...if it works, who the hell cares how he does it?" Weaver said, sounding genuinely bemused. Garrus winced inwardly as he said it; he'd heard enough arguments between Sensat and Butler over the last couple of weeks that he knew exactly how Butler was going to respond and exactly how self-righteous he'd be about it.

Butler drew himself up imperiously, which only had the effect of underscoring how ridiculously big Weaver was compared to him. "It's not about whether you can do something," he said, with an ominous glint in his eye, "it's about _how _you do it. It's about the skill, the artistry! If you've just planted an 'I win' button there ahead of time, that's worthless. A child could do that!"

"The method is nothing without the result," Sensat said. "You could write the most elegant breaker program the galaxy has ever seen, but what would it matter if it couldn't get results?"

"That's still better than-"

"_Enough!_" Garrus snapped, and slapped his palm against the table. Sensat and Butler both instantly fell silent. "God damn it! I hate this hacker crap! Sensat, if you can do something to help, _do it_. Butler, if you can't, _shut up_. Why is it that all you people do is bitch and moan at each other when we could be doing something actually useful? Melenis, make the damn call."

"...I have already made it," Melenis said.

"You know, you're kind of scary when you're angry," Vunas said. Garrus started, then looked down to realise that the screen had changed back to the Illium office while he'd been distracted. Vunas smiled mockingly up at him. "You seem upset."

"You hung up on us," Garrus said accusingly, jabbing a finger at the hologram. "That's rude."

"You got me kidnapped and nearly killed," Vunas said mildly. "I don't want any part in whatever bullshit you're elbow-deep in now. I'd have hung up again, but you were shouting at someone. It was pretty funny to watch. By the way, aren't you going to introduce me to your new friends?"

"No."

"Not even the bald one? He's cute."

All eyes turned to Monteague, who shrugged. "Monteague," he said. "Luc Monteague."

"If you're ever on Illium, call me," Vunas purred. "After all, I-"

"Vunas," Garrus said severely, "stop seducing my team. Are you going to help me or not?"

Vunas leaned back and rubbed the back of her neck with one hand, still looking at Garrus. "Didn't I make that clear?"

"That looks like nice real-estate you've got there. Must have cost a fortune," Garrus said. "Better than what you had on Deinech, isn't it?"

"All right, all right, you've made your point," Vunas muttered. "Yes, I guess I owe you a favour. Even though you nearly got me killed."

Garrus smiled thinly. "Don't take it personally. That happens to everyone I know."

"Ah. Fantastic," Monteague murmured.

Vunas sighed and sat forward again. "I will regret asking this, but what do you need?"

"There's a ship leaving Illium for Omega at some point in the next day or so," Garrus said, vaguely surprised that she was actually considering helping them. "The MSV, ah, _Starfucker._"

Vunas raised an eyebrow. "I think I saw that movie."

"...actually, I think I did too," Sidonis said slowly. "Wasn't it the one about the shuttle full of asari students who get stranded in deep space?"

"That's the one," Vunas said, grinning. "I remember thinking: how can she possibly take _that _in her-"

"All right then," Garrus said loudly, then went on before anyone else could speak. "We need to know exactly when the ship makes the jump and what its approach vector is."

Vunas frowned, then leaned right back and stared at the ceiling, drumming her fingers on her desk. "That's one hell of an ask," she said, without looking back. "You know that, right? I'd need to find out where it is to start with, then hire a stealth tracker drone to trace it and relay the information to you. That's expensive."

"Good thing you just happen to have lots of money," Garrus said cheerfully.

"Not as much as you'd think," Vunas said, still looking straight up. "Illium's an expensive place to live, let alone get set up. The information market here makes Deinech look like fucking child's play, but at least it's meritocratic. I'm not even entirely independent any more. I get handed down jobs by another broker in exchange for a commission as often as I have my own work, but the market's so full that everyone's trying to undercut everyone else. Profit margins are thin, but at least they exist."

"Are you saying you can't do it?" Garrus asked.

"No, I can do it," Vunas said, and snapped back to sitting upright. "And, well, you're right. I do owe you a lot."

_Well, technically you owe Sensat a lot, but who's counting? Apart from Sensat, obviously._

"Thanks, Vunas," Garrus said. "I appreciate it."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," Vunas said, waving a dismissive hand. "I just want to know how much security I'm gonna need to hire after this."

"If everything goes as planned, none."

Vunas chuckled at that. "And if, as past experience has led me to believe is pretty likely, it doesn't go as planned?"

"We-e-ll," Garrus said thoughtfully, tipping his head to one side, "if it doesn't, I'll be dead and thus won't care."

"Great," Vunas said cheerfully. "Well, that's good to know. Send me what you've got and I'll get started straight away. But I'm warning you, if I get kidnapped again, I'll – well, I'll probably die, but if I don't, I'll digitally insert you into a sex tape and send it to your family. Deal?"

"...do I have a choice?" Garrus said, knowing the answer already.

"Hell no," Vunas said, and pressed a button on her omnitool. The call failed to end. "Uh," she said, and tried again. "This is... odd."

"Sensat, stop it," Garrus said wearily.

"Merely proving a point," Sensat said, and cut the call himself. The holographic display changed to orange, then disappeared as Melenis turned his projector off.

"I still say it's cheating," Butler complained.

"Hacking _is_ cheating."

"You can still cheat at cheating."

"That sentence is so stupid I am genuinely at a loss as to how to counter it," Sensat said contemptuously. "Congratulations. You win."

"She a friend of yours?" Weaver said to Garrus, as Butler and Sensat continued to argue in the background.

"She's..." Garrus waved a hand in a vague gesture he hoped would get across some of what he was trying to express, and he was rather surprised when Weaver nodded in understanding. _Species and planet may change, but social awkwardness is a galactic norm. _"She's a contact," he finished lamely. "Certain events happened. We got her mixed up in some nasty trouble on Deinech a few months ago. She nearly got killed, but she walked away rich."

"I seem to recall a fusion bomb going off on Deinech a few months ago," Monteague said, and Garrus winced slightly at the memory. "It was on an island which didn't exist, or something like it. I don't suppose you were involved there?"

"Actually, we were," Garrus admitted. Monteague glanced up at him in surprise.

"Really? Your operations were on that kind of scale?"

"Well, kind of," Garrus said. "It started out fairly simply, then it got complicated fast. Too complicated. We were caught in the middle of a high-stakes game."

"Goddess, don't remind me about fucking Deinech," Erash muttered. "That was the worst damn day of my life. How the hell did we survive that?"

Garrus shrugged. "Luck, mostly."

"What happened?" Monteague asked. Garrus and Erash exchanged glances briefly, then Erash sat back, indicating that Garrus should choose what to say.

"...it's best that we don't talk about it," Garrus said. "Seriously. There are only six people left alive who have any idea what was going on that day, and I don't particularly want that number to grow."

It was Monteague's turn to shrug. "Fair enough."

In the background, a familiar song started to play. Vague memories floated back to Garrus of hearing it a few times on the _Normandy_, but he couldn't place exactly where he'd heard it.

"_Bitter anger: Born down in a dead man's town-_"

"-not a legitimate comparison," Sensat was saying as Garrus turned his attention back to the table. "Would you call the Fassilad Worm cheating simply because its delivery method was impossible to defend against at the time?"

"No," Butler said heatedly, "but Kafik didn't plant it ahead of time and claim it demonstrated how good he was at hacking when he activated it!"

Sensat bristled. "If you'd been listening to the first thing I've been saying-"

"Save it for later," Garrus said shortly. "For now, we have business to attend to."

Sensat and Butler both looked at him with identical expressions of extreme irritation, but they fell silent nonetheless. Garrus waited until there was absolute silence apart from the distant noise of an elcor singing something about his birthplace, then continued.

"Our assumption for the moment is that Vunas will come through and get us the information we need. Our plan after that is simple: use the element of surprise to quickly disable the _Starfucker_ – no, Sidonis, it isn't funny any more – and then board it."

"Is boarding necessary?" Erash asked, half-raising a hand. "Couldn't we, like, blow it the hell up or something?"

"In due course," Garrus said, "but we need to know where it was going first. That way we can break into the ship's computers and find out where it was going. We do that, and we find Williams. Then we kill him."

"Ah, you make it sound so simple," Erash said wistfully. "It's not going to happen like that, though. That would be boring. We always have to make it excitingly life-threatening."

"We'll need considerable coordination," Sensat said. "It will be difficult to disable a ship that size without causing serious damage, and it will not come quietly."

"Then we'll do what we do best," Garrus said, and stood up. After a moment, the others followed suit, Weaver and Butler hastily finishing drinks as they rose. "We'll have a fair amount of time to plan once we're on our ship. After that, well, that's when the fun begins."

"Ah, that kind of fun," Monteague said. "I don't like that kind of fun."

"We don't get many other types on Omega," Garrus said. He was one of the last out from the table, but he found himself at the head of the group as they headed for the exit. He briefly wondered how many of history's leaders only ended up where they'd been by sheer accident, then concluded that it was probably most of them. _I just wish I didn't have to be one of them._


	31. An Eye For An Eye: Interdiction

**AN EYE FOR AN EYE**

**THREE: INTERDICTION**

* * *

_There comes a time in every man's life when he must make a choice. A choice that will define him, that will make or break him on a fundamental level. A choice between glory and abject defeat._

_This is that time. This is my choice. And I- wait, is a King higher or lower than a Queen?_

Weaver was watching him carefully from across the table, his dark eyes glinting ominously behind bushy eyebrows. His two cards lay face-down in front of him, and all of his money-representing tokens lay in the middle of the table. Next to them sat five other cards, face-up: two eights, a ten, the one with a 'J' on it which was apparently better than a ten and worse than a King or Queen, and a four. If a King was more valuable than a Queen, Garrus could make five consecutive card values in ascending order from eight to Queen. If it was the other way around, he couldn't. From what he understood of the rules, that was bad.

_Think logically. The organisation of the cards must be traditional, which means it was invented a long time ago. In terms of legal authority, a regnant queen would have equal authority to a king, but humans spent most of their history as patriarchal societies, which means the King is probably more valuable. Unless that was changed for political reasons? No, no, that's overthinking it. The King must be more valuable. Must be._

"All in," he said finally, and pushed his sadly diminished pile of tokens forward to join Weaver's.

Weaver grinned like a shark. "I was hoping you'd say that. What have you got?"

"A consecutive sequence from eight to Queen," Garrus said, flipping over his cards to reveal a nine and a Queen and praying that he had the values of the cards right.

"A straight," Weaver said. "That's a straight. Not a bad one, either. It would win, if I didn't have two Jacks." He turned his cards over to reveal just that. "Jacks full of eights, and I get all your money."

"I'm liking this game less and less," Garrus muttered, watching Weaver scoop the huge pile of tokens towards him. "You told me a straight was good."

"It is," Weaver said. "Full house is better."

Garrus grimaced. "I'd prefer a full wallet."

Garrus and Weaver were the only ones left at the table. Monteague, Erash, Sidonis and Butler had all been playing at various points, but Sidonis hadn't even begun to understand the rules of the game, Erash had displayed a typical salarian disregard for conserving money, Butler had been called away to help fix an issue in the ship's computer and Monteague simply hadn't been very good. Looking around the shuttle's interior, Garrus didn't even know where everyone was; presumably Sidonis and Butler were in the cockpit, but there was no sign of either Sensat or Melenis. Erash was slumped on the shuttle's couch, playing some game on his omnitool, and Monteague had retired to one of the fold-out bunks. Most of them had at one point or another; they'd left the spaceport sixteen hours ago with no word from Vunas since then, and there were only so many ways to pass the time on a ship as small as this.

Garrus yawned and sat back. He had faith that Vunas would get the information they needed at some point, but the waiting was killing him. He hadn't slept in over a day, and while he was conditioned enough that he wouldn't be affected by it even without stims for at least another six hours, he didn't like that at all. He knew he should have caught some sleep while he could and that his window for doing it was getting ever narrower, but part of him was permanently sure that the call was just about to come through. He doubted he'd even be able to sleep with that in the back of his mind.

"You're not half bad at poker, I'll tell you that," Weaver said, collecting the cards into one neat pile. "Bloody good poker face. Or maybe that's just turians in general."

"You're lucky Melenis wasn't playing," Garrus said. "Even for a volus, he's unreadable."

"Well, he's not really an ordinary volus," Weaver said with a shrug. He finished arranging the cards and laid the pack on the table before starting to sort the vast pile of tokens. There was a stiffness in the movement of his arm; he'd taken the sling off two hours into the flight out of sheer irritation, and nobody had felt particularly inclined to have him put it back on. "I thought there was something weird going on in that warehouse. Not to mention that I didn't get why you had a volus on a combat team."

Garrus grinned. "You should've seen the look on your face. Monteague's too, come to think of it."

"You should have seen the look on _yours_," Erash called from the other side of the room. "Not that I was any different."

"What's his story, anyway?" Weaver asked. "Accident? Government experiment? Attacked by a gang of thugs then resurrected by Omni Consumer Products to clean up the streets of Detroit?" He glanced around at the identical looks of confusion on Garrus and Erash's faces and grunted. "Nobody appreciates the classics."

"Only he and Sensat know," Garrus said carefully. "Sensat says it's up to him, and he doesn't seem particularly inclined to share."

"You must have some idea," Weaver pressed. "Come on."

"If he wanted us to know, we'd know," Erash said tersely. "Drop it."

Weaver held his hands up in apology. "OK, OK, I get it. Just curious."

"I think humans have a saying about that," Erash said. "Something about a cat."

"Well, it's not as if-" Weaver started, then a sudden crackle of ear-splitting static hissed through the air. Garrus flinched, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Monteague jerk awake and upright inside a second, looking around wildly.

"Butler! What the hell is that?" Garrus yelled towards the cockpit, but as he spoke the crackle evaporated to be replaced by an asari voice.

"-on, Garrus, you'd better be there," it said testily. Garrus blinked in dumb surprise for a moment, then shook himself and opened up the call on his omnitool.

"Vunas?" he said. "Are you there?"

"You'd better be fucking grateful for this," Vunas snapped. "Do you _know_ how difficult this shit was? 'Find a single ship somewhere in the biggest city this side of Wora Mun, Vunas, and do it for free', you said. Why the hell did I agree to this?"

"Vunas, do you have what we need?" Garrus said patiently.

"Yeah, yeah, I have it," Vunas said irritably, "but I'm tired and bored and I have a splitting headache, so I'm going to complain at you for the next few minutes. Now, do you want to guess how many hours it took me to even _find_ that goddamn ship?"

"...not really?" Garrus said hopefully.

"_Guess_."

Garrus swallowed. He didn't want to challenge anything a voice like that said. "Uh... seven hours?"

"Fifteen," Vunas said coldly. "Fifteen hours – _unpaid_ hours of my own free time, during which I might have been doing something interesting like drinking or fucking - of staring at low-res spy shots of private docking bays until I found it. And by then it was leaving, so I had to spend ten grand to bribe some jackass freighter captain just to follow it and get its relay vector, and that was _after_ haggling, and the bitch still thinks I'm going to pay her the second half once I'm done. It'd be cheaper than hiring security to stop her trying to collect, but right now I'm in no mood to pay anyone anything. You can expect company in eighteen minutes, and in the unhappy eventuality that you somehow survive, you're paying me back. I don't care how much I owe you, it's not worth this!"

"Eighteen minutes?" Garrus said, gamely trying to extract the important points from the wall of anger pouring forth from the speakers.

"Seventeen point seven now," Vunas said. "I sent the vector to your navigation computer. Now piss off and die. Oh, and write up your will and leave everything to me while you're at it. Have fun."

The communication ended with another cacophonous screech of static. Garrus winced. _And if I know her, she sent that on purpose._

"Friendly one, isn't she?" Weaver commented, standing up. "I like her."

"I don't think _she_ likes anyone," Garrus muttered, and started up an open, ship-wide comm channel. "Most of you probably heard that, but in case you're deaf, we'll be running into some friends in about seventeen minutes. I want battle readiness in five."

"Uh, hey, yeah," Sidonis's voice replied. "Uh, please define 'battle readiness'."

"I think that for us, it mostly means 'don't be asleep or drunk'," Garrus said sadly. "I'd say 'battle stations', but I don't think we have any."

"So... what do we do?" Weaver asked.

"Can you man a military fire control station?"

"No."

"Fly a ship?"

"No."

"Maintain an engine?"

"No."

"Breathe in space?"

"No."

"Then put on a helmet," Garrus said, and headed for the engine room. The term 'engine room' was something of a misnomer; it was undeniably a room which contained an engine, but the compressed design of the ship and the large living section occupying much of the interior meant that whatever systems couldn't be squashed into the two-man cockpit were instead down by the engine, including fire control. Garrus grabbed his helmet from his bunk as he passed it, sealing it shut as he headed through the door.

The engine room was well-lit, clean and simply designed, as were most turian models. Garrus had never understood the obsession in popular media of presenting engine rooms as dark, cramped and chaotic. There was some truth in it; Sensat's old ship sprang to mind, but for the most part it made no sense. _Why would anyone want their working environment full of smoke and dim red lights? How would that help?_ Sensat was at a console, already wearing his own helmet, and Melenis emerged from behind the thick, uniform grey block that housed the engine as the door slid shut behind Garrus, one of his arms retracting to its regular size as he finished whatever he was doing.

"Do you want primary or secondary fire control?" the volus asked. Garrus paused to consider for a moment before answering, and he had to bite back on his pride as he did so.

"You take primary," he said. "You've got better reaction times than me."

"That is probable," Melenis said matter-of-factly. "Very well."

"I didn't know you knew how to use one of these things," Garrus said, heading towards the secondary fire control station set into one of the walls of the room. "Self-taught?"

"There is no volus military," Melenis reminded him. "Using a mass accelerator is simple, however. It is the accuracy which many find difficult."

"True enough," Garrus said. A plastic seat folded down from the console as he activated it, and he sat down. His omnitool and visor automatically linked up with the system, sending reams of numbers and text scrolling across his HUD. A few commands stripped away all but the truly important ones. It was technically against Hierarchy procedure, but he couldn't remember the last time he'd done anything according to Hierarchy procedure. The _Normandy_'s best gunners had all been bare-basics types as well, and he remembered one woman, an ensign called Sullivan, who'd actually turned off her targeting computer entirely sometimes. As he recalled, she'd fired the shot that finally brought down Sovereign at the Battle of the Citadel._ Not that they'd ever let it get out that she holed that thing by sight alone. Romantic notion, but a computer's just better. There's no crap about soul, or feeling, or gut instinct behind a fire control console. There's room for that behind a rifle, but not here. Not now._

"We're approaching the jump-in point," Sidonis said. "I have an exact countdown and precise vector. How are we going to play this?"

"Bring us behind where they're coming in," Garrus said. "Set it up so that it'll jump in just ahead of us so we have a clear shot at their engines. We need to slow them down."

"Coming around," Sidonis said. Garrus took his word for it. All his console showed was stars either way; Omega and its asteroids were too many millions of kilometres away to be visible at all, and even the mass relay they were waiting by looked like nothing more than a speck of blue light. There wouldn't be anything else for a time, and Garrus was content to sit back and wait.

A quarter of an hour passed uneventfully, mostly occupied by a checklist of minor procedures and tweaks. One of those turned out to be that Sidonis had forgotten to power up the ship's kinetic barriers, which didn't exactly fill Garrus with confidence for the upcoming battle. In theory, it should be simple: while the _Starfucker_ was bigger and more powerful than their corvette, they had the element of absolute surprise and a major advantage in knowing their enemy's exact future position. With that in mind, they were in an excellent position to quickly incapacitate the freighter.

_So, either I'm paranoid, or I'm right and we're spectacularly incompetent. Take your pick._

"Twenty seconds to the relay," Sidonis announced. "On course to follow them at their entry speed."

"Primary fire control is ready," Melenis said. Garrus ran a quick eye over his own systems – a smaller pair of mass accelerators which likely wouldn't do much against a ship like the _Starfucker_ and a single missile tube – and confirmed their readiness over the radio.

"Sitting here and hoping we don't die is good to go," Erash deadpanned.

Garrus counted the last few seconds down in silence. The anticipation in the air was damn near tangible, and he caught himself holding his breath as his fingers hovered over the controls. The line was absolutely, eerily silent; he couldn't even hear the tiny shifts in position that the comms normally picked up.

_And... show time._

Garrus had always found space combat rather unimpressive. The vids he'd watched as a kid had insisted that ship-to-ship combat always took place at a range of about ten metres, complete with loud, fiery explosions and dramatic music. He could always supply the music himself, but he could do nothing about the first two. Even the most intimate space combat would see the ships kilometres apart at the very least, and in most battles the enemy wouldn't even be in visual range. _Then again, realism doesn't sell. Who wants to see two fleets silently throwing tiny slugs at each other from a thousand kilometres apart?_

As it happened, they were far closer than normal. The _Starfucker _punched a hole through space and appeared out of the mass relay with the blue corona of eezo burning behind it like a meteor's tail, barely half a kilometre ahead of them. Garrus took a few milliseconds to mentally compliment Sidonis's precision, then a few more to wonder how much of it had been luck and how close they'd been to crashing straight into the freighter. It didn't matter: for now, they were in closer than any ship would normally get, and the computer immediately began searching for a firing solution. Garrus's console only displayed a wire-frame model of the enemy ship for simplicity's sake, leaving him feeling absolutely divorced from the combat. _Like playing a video game from the pre-space __era._

The firing solution appeared on his screen as a trio of small red crosshairs, one targeting each of the primary engines of the vast freighter. Melenis's single shot was represented by a larger blue target, centred between the engines where it could do the most damage. As soon as he saw it, Garrus stabbed a finger at the button he'd reprogrammed to read not 'CONFIRM FIRING SOLUTION' but rather 'KILL THE BASTARDS', and then sat back as his weapons started to reload.

The effect was dull. Four impact points appeared on the _Starfucker_'s image, and scrolling text informed him that the ship's sensors were indicating they'd inflicted major engine damage.

"Morons," Sidonis gloated, and a glance at the strategic map made Garrus inclined to agree. The _Starfucker_'s captain had apparently panicked and ordered the ship to come around, which was just about the worst thing he could have done in the situation. He could have just kept going; the ship's momentum would have carried it straight past Omega, where he might have been able to dock if he brought up kinetic barriers and evaded the incoming fire. Instead, he'd wasted his speed and stranded himself far away from Omega with crippled engines and a hostile ship on his tail.

_Good. Except for the fact that he can fire at us now. That's less good._

"Incoming fire," Butler called. Garrus was mildly impressed by the response time from the other ship, but their fire suffered in accuracy for what it had in speed. Of the three slugs the freighter sent tearing their way, two missed and one hit, sending the ship quivering and rocking but failing to get past the kinetic barriers. It was still a mighty hit, and Garrus suddenly realised that they might have underestimated the _Starfucker_'s firepower.

"Shields at 22!" Sidonis snarled. "Take out those fucking guns!"

Three more crosshairs appeared on Garrus's screen as his weapons returned to firing capability, and he shifted them onto the three broadside mass accelerators the freighter was packing. Melenis's crosshair followed a moment later, and they fired again. Garrus's breath caught in his throat as he stared down at the display: they'd wiped out two of the guns entirely and ripped a hole in the side of the ship, sending atmosphere billowing out of the ship and carrying some of the lighter cargo with it, but one of the guns was still intact, and one lucky shot would blow their corvette to hell.

"One slug, coming in!" Butler reported, but even as he spoke they took the hit. The ship bucked under Garrus like a wild upinx and half the overhead wires blew in a cloud of sparks and a tremendous bang, but the fact that there was still a ship rather than, say, a rapidly expanding cloud of superheated gas was encouraging. He hung on for dear life as the ship righted itself and Sidonis started yelping about damage, still staring fiercely down at his console. The targeting systems had gone dark with the slug's impact, but his weapon systems were already back online; that left him with the choice of waiting for them to come back, during which time they might well be finished off, or eyeballing it and hoping for the best.

_Well, I do have good eyeballs_...

It took him about a second to queue up an extrapolation of future vector on the enemy ship, and half that to give the order to fire all four main weapons. His heart thudded in his chest as the slugs howled silently through space, and he cursed when he looked down to find that the ship's sensors were dark too. He'd only know if he'd hit them if he didn't die in the next few seconds, which was hardly encouraging.

A few seconds passed. The ship did not appear to explode.

"Sensors coming back," Butler said tersely, then suddenly raised his voice in excitement. "They're drifting!"

Garrus let out the breath he hadn't even realised he'd been holding and flicked through the various maps on his console, trying to find a reasonably complete one as the sensors started to light up again. It took a few seconds, but soon he had a projection of the damaged freighter on his screen. It wasn't firing either engines or weapons, and it seemed to be drifting slowly and aimlessly through space, its trajectory perpendicular to Omega.

He sat back, emotionally drained. On the open comm line, he could hear quiet murmurs of relief and celebration, though they were subdued. _They have to know just how close we came. If that shot had landed a proper hit on us, we'd all be dead._

"Is this what all of your victories are like?" Monteague said, after a while. Garrus was rather impressed by the way he managed to keep any relief whatsoever out of his voice. "If so, I would like to register a complaint."

That was the cue for the floodgates to open, and suddenly the line was filled with several people all talking and cheering and laughing at once. Garrus didn't take any of it in; he was still sitting there, staring at the image of the _Starfucker_'s hulk on his screen.

_Every time I do something – anything – it always seems like I've only survived out of sheer dumb luck. Every single time, I've relied on things just happening to go right or circumstances to change favourably at the last second, and that's not sustainable. Luck runs out. The only question is how long it will take before the tank's empty._

_...I don't think I'm very good at being relieved._

"Fuck. That's not good," Sidonis said suddenly. The noise on the line tailed off as he spoke. "That's not good at all."

"What's not good?" Garrus asked.

"You blew up their cockpit. And most of the forward control area."

"Stopped the buggers in their tracks, didn't it?" Weaver pointed out.

"True," Sidonis said, "but we wanted computers."

"Computers which are now in several million pieces," Garrus mused. "That might be a problem."

"How bad is the damage?" Sensat asked. Garrus glanced back at him as he emerged from the engine again; half the right sleeve of his jumpsuit seemed to have caught fire at some point in the battle, but other than that he looked none the worse for wear. "Some systems might have survived."

"Don't think so," Butler said. "Looks like some pretty brutal wear and tear from where I'm sitting. You really did a number on them, Garrus."

"There'll be an archive core somewhere on board," Sensat said. He wiped a few beads of sweat from his forehead with the intact arm of his jumpsuit. "If we board, I can find it and get what we need. Probably."

"Ship's lost atmosphere and gravity," Butler said sceptically. "Getting around's not going to be easy if you head over there."

"The hell with that," Erash said. "Zero g is great fun."

"I'll take your word for it."

Garrus stood up, letting his seat fold itself back into the console, and headed back towards the corvette's main room. Weaver, Monteague and Erash were standing around, all of them holding helmets under their arms, and Melenis and Sensat followed Garrus through.

"Sidonis, put us on a tracking course and get in here," Garrus said.

"Gotcha," Sidonis said. The door to the cockpit slid open and Butler came through, stretching his arms as he walked. A few seconds later, Sidonis followed.

"So, we're not dead," Garrus began, which got a few quiet chuckles. "Unfortunately, I seem to have blown up what we needed."

"Nice job there, by the way," Sidonis said. "The one time you're _not_ meant to hit the bullseye, and you nail it."

Garrus smiled genially at him. "Shut up. Now, we've got some work ahead of us. Or, more accurately, Sensat has some work ahead of him. The rest of us are just there for sightseeing. Sightseeing and casual thievery."

"Does this thing even have a cargo hold?" Weaver said, looking around sceptically. "Looks a mite small for that."

"Not as such, no," Garrus conceded, "but I am unashamedly broke. Williams is hauling some of the highest grade weaponry Omega's seen in the last decade on that freighter, and we need to grab what we can rather than let it all go to waste."

"Ooh, I hope he's got some of those new Armax Crossfire-C models," Sidonis said enthusiastically. "Have you _seen_ the promo vids for those things?"

"That's a good point," Erash said thoughtfully. "New toys are always fun. I've seen some new stuff coming out of human armouries I wouldn't mind getting my hands on."

"You had the best armoury in the Terminus Systems at your disposal," Sensat said. "Then you let it get blown up. Along with the building it was in."

"I said I was sorry," Erash snapped.

"I suppose I could always upgrade my amp," Monteague murmured, one hand rising to the spot on the back of his neck where humans usually placed their implants.

"The Revenant's enough for me," Weaver said, then stopped and stared thoughtfully into the distance. "Although I could get a _second_ Revenant..."

"That's the spirit," Garrus said cheerfully. _And if I just happen to come across an Elanus Nightspike while we're over there, I certainly wouldn't be averse to giving it a good home._ "The freighter's not due in at Omega for two hours yet at that speed, so we'll have plenty of time to do a little shopping."

"I don't really need anything," Butler said. "I'll stay behind in case we need someone here."

"Some repairs to the ship are necessary," Melenis said, "and I am sufficiently equipped. I will also remain here unless I am needed."

"Fair enough," Garrus said, shrugging. "We need at least one person to stay here anyway, so that'll work. Let's just hope that not all of the cargo got blown out with the atmosphere."

"Actually, as far as I can tell, the breach was blocked by one of the gunships," Butler said. "Most of the stuff should still be inside, but without gravity it might be tough getting to it. Not that it's going to stop you lot. Ever heard the saying 'like kids in a candy store'?"

"There's a turian equivalent," Garrus said.

"Which is?"

"'Like kids in an arms dealership'."

* * *

"Play it again," Williams said blandly.

"Sir, I haven't been able to make out anything," the technician protested. "The raw data is, is, is just too degraded!"

He was sitting at a console in a side room of the main warehouse Williams' operation was based out of, which was a position he rather liked most of the time. Most of the time, he was left alone to work out minor technical issues and logistical decisions, and he liked that. Most of the time, nobody bothered him at all, and he liked that. Most of the time, he didn't have Gus Williams breathing down his neck and scaring the hell of out him, and he liked that.

Most of the time.

"Play it," Williams said, in exactly the same tone, "again."

The technician swallowed, and wordlessly cued the signal they'd received three minutes ago for the fourth time. Static poured out of the console's speakers. There were occasional troughs and peaks in the noise that suggested there had once been a complete signal before it had degraded so enormously, and just once or twice in the fifteen-second transmission, the technician could just about make out the sound of what might have once been a human voice.

It hissed and crackled its way to the end, then stopped. Silence followed.

"You're certain it came from around the relay," Williams said. The technician was hardly a people person, but he knew damn well that that hadn't been a question.

"Yes, sir," he said, and licked his lips. "I've tracked it to a one-hundred-ten thousand kilometre range around the relay, which means-"

"I know what it means," Williams said, and the technician swallowed again. "And it came on our comm bands."

"Possibly," the technician said. "By the time it got here, it was spread across a few dozen, three of which are ours. It might have originated from them, or from somewhere else."

"But combine the time, the place and the band," Williams murmured, more to himself than to the technician, "and it has to be for us."

The technician didn't say anything. He was rather hoping that Williams would go away very soon and creep out somebody else. There was just something very slightly off about that angelic face that sent shivers down the technician's spine whenever he saw it looking his way, which was thankfully rare. Something about the mouth, the smile. _Like a blond shark._

"Why would they send us this transmission now when they could have waited half an hour and done it by comm buoy?" Williams said, and the technician realised with dread that that _had_ been a question.

"It might have been a mistake," he offered. "Or another ship came through at around the same time and sent the signal, or perhaps it was a glitch-"

"No," Williams said. The technician's mouth slammed shut like a portcullis. "Something is wrong."

_Agreed_, the technician thought, but he had a feeling they were talking about different things.

Williams remained there behind the technician, grasping the back of his chair, for a few seconds before suddenly standing up, making the technician jump a little as he did so.

"Send a general communiqué," he said. "I want twenty men and a full crew on board the _Hailfire_ inside ten minutes, to leave in fifteen. An old friend and I need to meet for a friendly chat."

_I heard exactly how your last 'friendly chat' went down,_ the technician thought, _and that was only two nights ago._ _You barely escaped with your life, and a dozen of your best men were killed in the process. You're insane._

However, saying that was probably not going to help either his career or his ability to breathe, so the technician settled for frantically sending out the message as Williams turned and finally left him alone.

The door slid shut as he finished, and the technician let out a heartfelt sigh of relief. As bad as it would be for his paycheque, he was secretly hoping that Williams' old friend was going to finish what he'd started this time. He'd have quit his job already if he wasn't terrified of what might be done to him if he did, but for now he was fairly confident that he was safe. Whatever happened, _someone_ was going to die, and he felt no small sense of achievement in having made sure it wouldn't be him.

_Not sure I can say the same for the poor bastards up there, though._


	32. An Eye For An Eye: Interruption

**AN EYE FOR AN EYE**

**FOUR: INTERRUPTION**

* * *

Garrus listened to the slow hiss of his own breathing as the airlock cycled through. It was the only sound; the last of the air was draining away, leaving nothing to hear apart from whatever was said on the silent comm line. The six of them were crowded in tightly, but Garrus was at the head of the group, meaning he could neither hear nor see the others. He kept getting an itch to turn around and make sure they were all still there, as if he was living in some bad horror vid. _Ever the fearless leader, Garrus. Good job._

Suddenly, gravity disappeared. Garrus's feet left the floor the instant he moved a muscle, and he took hold of one of the bars set into the ceiling of the airlock. The blue light above the airlock entrance flicked noiselessly to green, indicating that the cycle was complete, and the door slid open to reveal their destination.

"Jesus Christ," Weaver muttered, his voice crackling minutely inside Garrus's helmet.

"There is no way that this is safe," Monteague said. He pulled himself gently forwards past Garrus and peered through the door. His helmet was completely opaque, but somehow his body language conveyed a distinct lack of enthusiasm for what lay ahead. "This is insane."

"Listen," Sidonis snapped, "we could have gone in via their airlock if _somebody_ hadn't blown it to pieces, but because of that person – who will remain nameless, _Garrus_ – this is the only way on board. Like it or leave it."

The airlock door would normally have opened onto another airlock. Instead, it opened onto nothing. Sidonis and Butler had spent a careful ten minutes exactly matching the speed of their corvette to that of the freighter and shifting it gently into position with the help of emergency docking cables, but that was of little comfort to Garrus as he looked across a five-metre stretch of space and into the ripped, torn hull of the _Starfucker._

What he could see inside was a mess of crates, loose guns and general debris, floating around the zero-gravity interior of the freighter, already looking like a nightmare to navigate, especially with only the basic manoeuvring jets built into their suits. That didn't matter so much compared to the fact that just to get there, he'd have to jump out of a spaceship. Nasty, painful memories of doing exactly the same thing on Omega needled at him, and his ankle twinged in sympathy. _Not what I'd call a fun afternoon._

"Well, might as well get on with it," he said, with confidence only an idiot wouldn't be able to see as false, and jumped.

His target was the gash along the hull of the freighter, about ten metres wide and five high at the centre. To jump, he'd had to push himself down to get a good platform and then use the floor as a springboard to send him soaring out through the gap and into space. He'd had practice enough of the manoeuvre in basic zero-g training, though not for this specific scenario. He rather doubted that any military had ever had plans for such a ramshackle boarding action, but in the end it didn't matter; his leap sent him clean through and into the interior of the freighter, where a command on his omnitool turned on his boot's magnetic field. He dropped three feet with what would have been a clang if there'd been any air to hear it in, then turned just in time to see Sensat awkwardly fling himself over.

The batarian hadn't had Garrus's training, that much was obvious. His helmet's visor was transparent, allowing Garrus to pick out the exact moment Sensat realised that he was sailing through space, but his leap had been more or less accurate. He crashed headlong into Garrus in a tangle of limbs before he activated his own magnetic boots and found his feet.

"A regular action man, aren't you?" Weaver said, clearly holding back laughter.

"I'm the best technician in the Terminus Systems," Sensat shot back as Weaver silently touched down beside them. "My expertise doesn't extend to- ow!"

A heavy crate had been interrupted in its weightless wandering by Sensat's head, and Sidonis, Erash and Weaver simultaneously burst into uproarious laughter as the batarian rubbed the back of his helmet. Garrus managed to keep a straight face, sending the crate floating away again with a push, but the stony look on Sensat's face was making it difficult to keep any chuckles from escaping.

It took thirty seconds or so before they were all on the freighter, Erash making the jump last. Garrus waited until his boots' magnetism flicked on before calling up the rough floor plan of the _Starfucker_ on his omnitool, projecting it as a flickering orange hologram.

"OK, kids," he said. "As Sensat has so kindly demonstrated for us-" - a ripple of chuckles sounded over the line, with Sensat's gravelly voice conspicuous in its absence - "-this place is dangerous. Nobody goes off alone; we'll have three teams of two. Weaver, you're with me. Erash, you go with Sidonis. Monteague-"

"Just Luc, if it's all the same," Monteague interjected.

Garrus nodded. "Luc, then. You go with Sensat."

Monteague's helmet turned from Garrus to Sensat, then back again.

"...as you say," he said. He left the question unspoken, but Garrus could sense it still hanging there. '_Why him?' Because I want to see you work together, and you know that's what I'd say if you'd asked the question._

"You two are heading aft, towards the secondary computer banks," Garrus went on, marking a small red dot on the hologram with the tip of his finger. "That's on the sublevel back there, near engineering. Once you have the data, head back this way, and we'll rendezvous where we're standing now after an hour or so. As for the rest of us, we get to go shopping. You've all got a copy of the list; if you see anything which is on it, snag it and report it in. All clear?"

He got back a round of murmurs and nods.

"All right, then. Rendezvous in fifty minutes. Let's go."

The freighter was structured somewhat unusually for a cargo vessel. There were several sublevels at various points in the ship, one of which they'd broken into, but there was one vast main level that stretched a solid fifty metres up and three times that along. Garrus had seen it on the holograms, but that didn't prepare him for what he saw when he climbed the ladder leading up out of the sublevel and floated up into the main level.

The _Starfucker_ was an impossibly huge cathedral of a ship, its upper reaches barely even visible without enhanced vision, but that came a distant second to the chaos they'd created. Crates ranging in size from a couple of feet across to enormous containers ten times that in length were tumbling slowly in all directions, accompanied by the contents of dozens which had opened and spilled their insides out. Guns, armour and all sorts of miscellany were strewn about, colliding and spinning in a huge non-pattern that made Garrus's head hurt just to look at it. He could see a few dormant LOKI mechs floating by in their compact mode, and if he zoomed in with his visor he could make out the shape of an ERC _Hutakaza_-class gunship, hanging almost motionless in the vacuum near the ceiling.

_Finding anything in this is going to be... well, it's not going to be easy, that's for sure._

"Oh, man," Sidonis said appreciatively as he ascended the ladder behind Garrus. "This is fucking crazy. Look at this place!"

"I guess it was too much to hope that it would be easy," Garrus said.

"Fuck easy," Sidonis said diffidently. "We don't do easy."

"Evidently," Monteague murmured. "Finding anything here is going to be impossible."

Garrus turned off his mag-boots and gently pushed himself up. The space above him was fairly clear, and he rose for about twenty metres before he brought his suit's manoeuvring jets online. Any suit of armour which guaranteed that it was safe to use as a spacesuit was required by Citadel to _be_ a functional spacesuit, which meant that most armour came equipped with a basic system of jets. Garrus had bought his in the Terminus Systems, but even there the convention was strong enough to ensure that the jets were ubiquitous. _Not that they're going to save your life if you're unlucky – or stupid - enough to get spaced._

"I want radio chatter kept to teams," he said, and manipulated his jets so that he was more or less stationary. "Check in every now and again, but use individual circuits."

_And that's bad protocol, but I'm guessing they won't question it._

He was right. It took a minute or so of adjusting frequencies and priming jets, but eventually the group split into three and began to disperse. Garrus watched Sensat and Monteague start to head towards the back of the ship, noting how they were never closer than about ten feet apart as they went. Sidonis and Erash went the other way, and although he couldn't hear what they were saying, he could see animated hand gestures which were unmistakeably accompanying something obscene as they disappeared into the forest of debris.

"Ready to go?" Weaver asked, jetting up beside him and coming to a stop.

"Yeah," Garrus murmured. "Sure."

"Great. Any idea where the bloody hell we should start?"

Garrus looked around. Hundreds of crates were in sight, but he had no idea what each one held. There weren't even helpful labels; the crates only seemed to be marked with some kind of scan code of black stripes, and without the key, it was impossible to tell what they were saying. One caught his eye, though.

"Up there," he said, pointing. Weaver followed his finger, then looked down and nodded. "Could be good. Let's check it out."

His own voice sounded faintly distant to him; the absolute silence apart from what was on the comm line was always eerie in a vacuum, and the freighter felt both claustrophobic and oddly agoraphobic. It was too big and too crowded.

_It _was a long container, about four metres lengthways and a metre in the other two, about the size of a lot of wholesale arms containers. It was almost stationary; in a vacuum, there'd have been no air friction to slow it down, but it was slightly dented in certain places, suggesting it had impacted with enough other crates in the chaos to lose most of its kinetic energy. It was very slowly rotating on an almost straight axis, its long side roughly perpendicular with the floor of the ship below.

Garrus jetted up and flipped himself over so that he was now travelling feet-first and looking down at Weaver's ascending head, then brought himself to a stop as the crate entered his reach. Weaver shifted around to the other side, and together they disconnected the latches and opened it up. Inside, a single long, dark cylinder gleamed.

"Well," Weaver said, "that's... something."

"That certainly is something," Garrus agreed.

"Yeah," Weaver said. "Something."

Several seconds passed before Weaver bit the bullet. "Uh, what kind of something?"

"I'm not all that up on human-made artillery," Garrus said, "but that looks a hell of a lot like some kind of big gun barrel. _Really _big."

"Look at the size of it!" Weaver hissed. "That's a bloody barrel?"

"Yes," Garrus said slowly. "Your friend Williams is supplying full-blown artillery to somebody on Omega."

"I've never seen any of that on Omega before," Weaver said doubtfully. "Not even on the news."

"Indeed." Garrus pushed the lid of the crate down, then pushed himself away with his feet. "That's what worries me. That's equipment for a damn war, not a gang scrap."

"Blood Pack. Has to be."

"You may be right," Garrus said. "Let's move on."

"We're going to be pissing a lot of people off," Weaver said, following Garrus as he jetted away towards a cluster of smaller crates that were caught together with broken crash webbing.

"That's kind of what we do," Garrus said ruefully. He batted a loose Avenger assault rifle out of his face and set to work levering open one of the crates, clinging to it like a heavily armoured limpet. "Part of the job description, really. 'Bring some justice and paint a nice big target on your ass for less pay than you'd get stacking shelves' about sums it up."

"Is it worth it?" Weaver asked. He set to work on his own crate. "At the end of the day, you're pretty likely to die doing what you do."

"If you're not in danger, you're not helping." The crate opened with a jerk, and its contents started to spill up and out. It was packed full of pistols, mostly converted Raikou models. _Worthless._

"With you there," Weaver grunted. He was struggling a little with opening his crate, his injured arm clearly impeding him, but Garrus didn't bother trying to help him. He knew Weaver would have too much pride to accept help. "I mean, look at Anderson. He's trying to help, but he did more good in the fleet than he'll ever do on the Council."

"I like Anderson," Garrus said. "He has a good line in punching people. Helped save the galaxy that one time."

"Exactly," Weaver enthused. His crate finally opened up, and he peered inside. "Looks like this one's for you." He jetted away so that Garrus could take his place, talking all the while. "See, you do good work. You're out here on the front lines, delivering payback. I'm just asking, is it worth it?"

"Justice," Garrus said.

"What?"

"What we bring is justice, not payback. We're not in the revenge business."

"Is that so?" Weaver said. "Interesting. So you going after Williams, then, that's justice, is it?"

"Depends," Garrus said. The crate was full of neatly stacked rifles, all folded into their compact modes, and he started to rummage through it.

"Depends on what?"

"Depends on who kills him. If it's me, it's justice. If it's you, it's revenge."

"So there's no difference."

"There's a world of difference." Garrus got through the top few layers of assorted Mantises and Punishers, sending them scattering all around him, and started work on the rest of the crate. "Let me ask you: if you had Williams at your mercy, what would you do?"

"I'd kill the little git."

"Obviously. How?"

Weaver didn't respond for a few seconds. "...I don't know," he said finally. "Something slow. Painful."

"Exactly."

"What, you'd just put a bullet in his head?"

"Yes," Garrus said, and then something caught his eye. "Oh, this is shiny."

He withdrew a lean, narrow rifle from the crate and extended it to its full length, then raised it to his shoulder and peered down the scope. He sighted, and fired a test shot at a helmet tumbling gently fifty metres or so away. It silently holed the visor and shattered the back into a swarm of broken shards, sending the remains of the helmet spinning madly away across the freighter.

"Nice shot," Weaver said. "That the Nightspike you were looking for?"

"No," Garrus said, and folded the rifle back up again. "This is an Armax Needle. Generation 5, if I'm not mistaken. It's no Nightspike, but it's better than what I've got."

He fitted it onto the secondary weapon slot on the back of his armour and looked back up at Weaver. "Let's keep going."

This time, they jetted right up to the top of the freighter, or what would have been the top if gravity had still been functioning. The ceiling's struts and ridges had trapped a fair few crates, leaving it a fertile looting ground, and they each methodically started working through them.

"So you're saying that if I kill Williams, it's not justice," Weaver said, after a few seconds. "Is that it?"

"It might be," Garrus said. "Would you be doing it because you thought it was the right thing to do, or would it be because you hated his guts?"

"Can't it be both?" Weaver said, only half-jokingly.

"Justice is impartial."

"Bullshit." Garrus looked around in surprise at the harsh tone in Weaver's voice. "Williams is a murdering son of a bitch who deserves everything he gets. I hate the bastard, but if I kill him, that's still justice. If you kill him, it's justice. There's no difference."

"If you believe that, then you don't understand what I'm trying to do," Garrus said. His crate opened to reveal nothing but a dozen salarian helmets, and he moved on to the next. "I'm not on Omega for personal revenge. I'm-"

"Getting revenge for other people," Weaver interrupted. "That's all justice is. You're taking revenge on behalf of the people too weak to take it for themselves."

"True."

"You accept that?"

"That's what I've always been saying."

"You said revenge could never be justice!"

"I said _personal_ revenge can never be justice. Not the same thing. What you do matters, but so does why you do it. The whole point of every justice system in the galaxy is to see that people get what they deserve from an objective standpoint. If you let it get subjective, if you let the victim dispense justice..." He trailed off, stopped searching the crates. Weaver noticed, and did the same, turning to face him. "If you do that," Garrus went on, after a moment, "then you're losing everything that makes it justice. The victim only sees it in black and white: black, the person who wronged them, and white, themselves. Justice isn't black and white. It's grey. They don't know what to do with grey."

"And say you're the victim," Weaver said. "Say someone kills your family or something, I don't know. Say you know beyond all doubt who did it. Say you've got a chance to kill them clean and walk away. Do you take that shot? Do you call that justice?"

The pause lasted well over ten seconds that time.

"I don't know," Garrus said eventually. "I don't know. I don't have all the answers."

"So you'd let someone else take the decision for you?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"Besides, seems to me that your brand of justice _is_ pretty black and white anyway," Weaver said thoughtfully. "Not much grey area when there's a bullet in your skull."

"Actually, in that situation," Garrus said thoughtfully, "there's probably quite a lot of grey area." Weaver's helmet turned towards him again for a moment, then they both broke into simultaneous laughter.

"Grey area!" Weaver chortled. "Oh, that's a good one."

"That was pretty good," Garrus admitted, blinking away tears of laughter. "Just don't ask me to do stand-up."

Weaver laughed again, a deep, booming guffaw entirely suited to his build. "The Archangel Stand-Up Comedy Tour! Two hours of jokes about headshots, mixed in with random gunfire into the audience!"

"And the sad thing is," Garrus said, "on Omega, that would be a hit!"

They cracked up again, and this time it took fully twenty seconds before they had themselves under control again. Garrus's sides were hurting by the end, and he had no idea why they'd been laughing so hard. He reasoned that it was probably a product of the po-faced seriousness of the conversation and that odd streak of tightly-wound nerves the isolation of the situation had created, but even knowing that, he had to keep biting the inside of his cheeks to stop himself from bursting out again.

"Christ almighty," Weaver said, wheezing slightly. "I think I cracked a rib in that warehouse. That didn't help."

"I guess we should probably get on with it," Garrus said, gesturing towards the vast , swirling mass of crates filling the freighter.

"Aye, we've wasted enough time," Weaver agreed. "Cackling like loons and debating political philosophy on the job? Who's running this shambles?"

Garrus grinned inside his helmet and jetted off towards another promising batch of crates. "Laugh it up, Weaver."

"Been there, done that, bought the bloody t-shirt."

* * *

It took Sensat and Monteague almost ten minutes to work their way to the back of the ship. The debris had been relatively thin in the air back at the hold's rough centre, but the largest crates had been aft before the battle had dislodged them. Now, they were ponderously floating around, leaving barely any space for them to squeeze through. The vast containers were deceptive; they were slow, but their sheer mass meant that getting between one and the surface it was heading towards was not helpful for one's long-term health prospects.

Sensat grimaced as another one of the massive blocks silently crushed its way downwards in front of them, grinding another FENRIS mech into a small cloud of circuit boards and broken duraplas and began to bounce back up. They were taking refuge in one of the containers which had miraculously been held in place by its weak bindings, though both of its ends had swung open, spilling the dozens of FENRIS mechs inside all over the place. A few of them were still lodged inside with them, but Sensat was taking great care to ensure none of them were going to hit him. His head was still painful from the last impact.

"We can make it across after the next crate comes down," he said, glancing back. Monteague was standing silently a few feet behind him. "After that, we have a clear route to the door."

"As you say," Monteague said tersely.

Sensat blinked slowly, then turned away. He knew he wasn't exactly a social animal, but he was no fool. He could see exactly what the human thought of him. _An irrelevance. We are not here to make friends._

"As soon as we have the space," he said, without bothering to look for a reply. As predicted, none was forthcoming. "Wait. Now."

Monteague was restricted to his standard store-bought armour's specifications, forcing Sensat to look for solutions which would allow both of them passage. His own armour was in a constant state of repair and improvement, though he preferred to avoid situations in which he was forced to wear it. Nevertheless, he'd spent hours tinkering with it, resulting in a suit which could theoretically have let him jet about at roughly three hundred kph in a vacuum, once he worked out a way to prevent the Gs from ripping his face off.

As it was, he was reduced to using one-fifteenth power as they quickly blasted across the gap left by the rebounding crate. It was the last stretch, taking them right up to the door to the engineering section of the ship, and less than two seconds after they'd ducked under the overhang another container noiselessly smashed down behind them.

Monteague moved to open the door, but Sensat grabbed his arm before it could reach the control. Monteague's helmet turned towards him.

"The engineering section was not compromised," Sensat said. "There's still air past here. Turn on your magnetic boots."

Monteague stayed staring at him for a couple of seconds, then looked down and activated his boots. Sensat did the same, feeling the jolt up his spine as something like gravity suddenly returned, then pressed the door control himself.

A massive blast of air hit him full on, sending him swaying and staggering back until he could sidestep out of the way. As he did, the faint roaring he could hear faded away, and he waited as occasional pieces of debris were blown out of the door along with the air. Loose crates were picked up by the torrent, sending them spinning back wildly towards the front of the ship, and even some of the massive containers started to slowly change direction. At last, after a full thirty seconds or so, all the air was gone, and Sensat stepped out and through the door, Monteague following a few paces behind.

The engineering section was cramped and low-tech, as Sensat had expected. He knew what he was looking for, and headed straight towards the ladder leading down to the sublevel where the computer cores would be located.

The sublevel was devoid of debris. Everything there was either bolted down or too big to be shifted by the sudden disappearance of the atmosphere, although a few of the light fittings had been yanked out of their sockets. One of them was hanging by a solitary wire, flickering on and off at random. A long corridor lay ahead of Sensat, the shadows and darkness created by the broken lights making it look ominous.

They walked down it in sullen silence, but Sensat was beginning to wonder if that was such a good idea. He was well accustomed to solitude; he'd spent four years in it with only occasional interaction, and the fact that said interaction had been entirely with a mental clone of himself and a genocidal psychopath had not imbued him with a hunger for social interaction. However, he knew that this was different: Monteague had no problem conversing with the others in the group. It was merely when it came to him that the talk dried up.

Sensat was not the sort of person who was even aware of the sensation of having hurt feelings. He _was_, however, the sort of person who saw the world as a puzzle. Everything fitted together in one way or another, and though the patterns and products were often chaotic and ill-defined, the underlying atomic fabric remained constant. For him, the universe was a deterministic system which could be worked out if given a quiet room, a few quadrillion years and more cups of coffee than there were hydrogen atoms. Accordingly, he found his mind wandering to Monteague's reticence.

_He is human. I am batarian. That is the likely source of the conflict, yet his relations with Garrus and Sidonis seem non-hostile despite the mutual human-turian distrust. Therefore, either batarians hold a uniquely despised status to him, or he merely dislikes me personally. Both are very much plausible._

He made a careful mental note of what he had deduced, then turned to Monteague as they approached the door to the computer core room. "Purely out of intellectual curiosity," he said, "is your antipathy towards me personal or racially motivated?"

Monteague's helmet turned towards him silently. Three seconds passed. Sensat reasoned that perhaps he had been so accustomed to silence that he had not been paying attention to what he had said, and so repeated the question.

"I heard you the first time," Monteague muttered. "I... neither. I don't have a problem with you."

"Your behaviour indicates otherwise," Sensat said, and opened the door into a small, badly-lit room. The computer core was housed in a series of upright black cabinets along both wall, and he moved over to them, calling up a console on one of them to begin the data transfer. As he did so, he explained his reasoning to Monteague.

The human didn't audibly react for a few seconds, although this time Sensat elected not to repeat himself.

"Look," he said finally, "I'm not a racist."

"So it is personal," Sensat said amenably. "That is all I wanted to know. Please start up one of the consoles and input the file I send you."

"What?" Monteague said, sounding taken aback. Sensat sighed irritably, and repeated himself.

Monteague stood looking at him for a second, then turned and moved to one of the computers on the opposite wall. "It's not personal," he said. "I don't... I mean, it's not that I don't like you-"

"Then it is a dislike of batarians," Sensat said. He sent the file over to Monteague's omnitool; it was a worm, intended to bypass the hard-coded security measures built into the computer core. "It is understandable. For the most part, we are a terrible people. Our politics are toxic, and as a result of them many of our planets are as well. Our cultures have a tendency to produce criminals and monsters far greater than that of any other race besides the krogan. And representatives of my race have launched surprise attacks on your civilians, then broken off relations with you when you had the temerity to defend yourselves. I merely wish to assure you that we are not all alike, just as Deus- that is, just as Saren was not the prototype for all turians, nor Laeton that of all salarians, nor Hitler that of all humans. I have no objection to you disliking me because I am the person I am. However, I do object to you disliking me because other people are the people they are. I feel it is important that this is clarified."

"...who's Laeton?" Monteague asked quietly.

"He was a prominent Lystheni salarian seven hundred years ago," Sensat said. "He murdered two million people when he destroyed an asteroid settlement with an antimatter bomb. It was the catalysing event for the Severance."

"What happened to him?"

Sensat smiled thinly. "He died of old age in his bed, surrounded by his friends and family."

"No justice in this galaxy," Monteague murmured.

"Not enough," Sensat agreed.

Silence.

Sensat looked around to see Monteague standing and staring at a blank console.

"Luc, you've switched off your computer," Sensat said. "What's wrong?"

"...nothing," Monteague said, after another short period of silence. "I'm alright."

He activated the console and entered a couple of commands before slowly coming to a halt again. Sensat launched his final worm, glanced at the ETC flashing on his screen, then stood waiting. He could tell Monteague was about to say something, although he couldn't have said exactly what it would be.

"I grew up in Paris," Monteague said finally. He was still facing away from Sensat, silhouetted against the orange glow of his console. "It's a terrible city. It was beautiful once, but the landmarks were swallowed up by the urban sprawl. Twenty million people live in Paris now, sleeping in tiny rooms in big apartment blocks and working in tiny rooms in big office blocks. I hated it. That was all I had to look forward to in that city. My parents both worked long hours in that sort of soul-crushing white-collar job, and that was what I had waiting for me, because there was nothing else for people like us. But... when I was, what, fourteen? Around that. When I was fourteen, I left the city for the first time. Of course, I was a biotic, and it was just about the time that it was starting to be seen as safe and even advantageous, rather than some freak disability. Conatix paid my family well for the right to install my implants. L3, free from side-effects. Like I said, I was lucky."

Sensat watched the human's hand rise to the nape of his armoured neck and rest there for a moment.

"It was just a holiday," Monteague went on. "We rented a house. A real house! It was a little town about thirty kilometres outside Marseille. There were only a couple of thousand people living there. After living in a city where you had about as much room to live as you did to store your clothes, that was incredible. I couldn't understand why more people didn't live there. Why would you want anything else? It was idyllic.

"We had to go back, of course. It just made it worse, as you'd expect. I lived six more years in that city. It would only have been five, but I met her."

"Her?" Sensat asked, once it was clear Monteague had gone silent.

"Elaine," Monteague said. "Her name was Elaine. My ticket out became two tickets out. I needed hard cash, and... there are many uses for biotics."

He trailed off into silence for a few seconds. Sensat said nothing, but he felt he was beginning to see how the pieces fitted together.

"Mercenary work was only ever meant to be a stopgap," Monteague said at last. "She never knew. Perhaps she suspected, but she never knew. I did it all for love, because I was young and foolish and didn't understand anything. The definition of love, I suppose. It didn't matter; I left that life behind when I left Earth behind. It cost me everything I had but her to get off that planet, but I had to. I couldn't just go to the countryside again. Even that was being polluted, swallowed up. I'd always wanted to go to the frontiers, out in the new colonies. It was a new start. We went together."

"Elysium," Sensat murmured, as the last piece fell into place. "You went to Elysium."

"Yes," Monteague said, still staring at his console. "And so you already know how the story ends. We were captured. Separated. Alliance forces freed my group. Hers were on a slave ship heading out when the _Agincourt_ destroyed it. Terrible irony, really."

"I'm sorry," Sensat said.

Monteague chuckled bitterly. "Are you?"

"Yes."

"So am I," Monteague said distantly. "I fought alongside Commander Shepard during the Blitz, you know. She was rallying survivors, making a militia. Killing the bastards. I thought maybe I could still get to Elaine somehow, that I could catch up to her ship. The last time I saw her she was being loaded onto it with the rest of them, like fucking cattle. I didn't find out it had been destroyed for days. All I was doing in that time was helping them kill every last batarian on Elysium. It wasn't enough, it could never be enough. Not even Torfan was enough."

"You were on Torfan?" Sensat asked.

"Yes. The Alliance was always weak on the ground in terms of numbers. They hired freelancers and merc companies for Torfan, but barely anyone took them up. The pay wasn't bad, but the work was near suicidal. I'd have done it for free, but everything I owned was a pile of ashes on Elysium. And, as I said, there are many uses for biotics."

"Few people survived Torfan," Sensat said. "On either side."

Monteague turned to face him with orange light reflecting from his helmet's opaque eyeguards. "I know," he said. "I should have been killed a dozen times over on that wretched rock, but they always seemed to miss... and I always seemed to hit. I kept track of my kills. There were nine on Elysium. Twenty-two on Torfan. Thirty-one total. Not enough. Never enough. The hate never ended no matter how many I killed. Elysium and... Elaine, they're nothing but memories now. I could never forget them. But that kind of hate doesn't fade, and it's more real than they are now. They're memories, but strong ones. Almost as if they're the real thing, sometimes. And then, sometimes, it seems like maybe none of it happened. It feels so distant then. It's like they're not even my memories, just some images in my head. No emotional connection any more. I don't have anything left of either of them. There was no body, the entire neighbourhood was turned to ash and sealed off... I don't even have any pictures of her, at least none that aren't available online. Nothing personal or private. Like she's just a woman I once dreamed I was in love with, but who I never really knew. And when it gets like that, the hate's still there. I can hold onto that, and the hate brings it all back. It's the only thing connecting me to them now, and if I gave up the hate, I'd lose the last traces of that life. It would be for the best if I did, I know that, but I feel like I have to... I don't know. I have to hold on to it. It reminds me that there's a better life than the one I have now... and that I can't have it again. And that keeps the hatred burning."

A few seconds passed in silence.

"I try to be tolerant," Monteague said. "Rationally, I know it was just criminal elements and psychopaths who caused the Blitz. They weren't even all batarian. There are batarians who are regular people and live good lives, and there are the monsters, just like any other race. This is what I know. But what you know very rarely trumps what you feel."

"Nobody would blame you for that," Sensat said.

"No, I suppose not," Monteague said heavily. "Not in the Terminus Systems, anyway. Look... I'm sorry, for what it's worth. I have nothing against you, and I know it's a stupid prejudice anyway, but I can't change how I feel."

"I didn't want an apology," Sensat said. "I simply wanted to know. Thank you for telling me."

Monteague grunted. "You're the first one. You're not the gossiping sort, I can tell that. Just... don't spread it around. I can stomach you knowing it, because you're not inclined to sympathy. I don't know about the others, but I don't want anybody telling me they're 'there for me'."

"Nobody else knows?"

"Nobody."

Sensat nodded. "Very well. We all have our secrets."

"I don't doubt it," Monteague said. "We should get back to work. I'd like to have time to find a new amp later."

Sensat glanced back at his console and saw that his worms had punched clean through the core's weak defences during the time they'd been talking. He was reaching for the keyboard when Sidonis's panicked voice suddenly entered the line, making him jump. He span around out of instinct, leaving him and Monteague staring at each other again while Sidonis spoke.

"Problem!" he was shouting. "Oh, we have a problem here!"

* * *

**TWENTY SECONDS EARLIER**

* * *

"We're in range," the pilot of the _Hailfire_ reported, looking back at Williams.

"Send the signal," Williams said, with another of his too-wide smiles. Shivers ran down the pilot's spine like a snowman playing the xylophone, and he quickly looked back to his instruments.

"Signal sent, sir," he said, hoping that would make Williams go away.

The pilot couldn't see it, but he could somehow _feel_ that Williams was still smiling as he spoke. "Time for the warm-up act."

* * *

**THREE MINUTES EARLIER**

* * *

"Sidonis, there's nothing but mechs in here," Erash said irritably. "Look! Mechs! Lots of them! That's _all_."

The container was the biggest on the ship: thirty metres in length and ten in height and width, it was far too large to have been shifted by the sudden loss of atmosphere. It was weighed down by its contents: hundreds upon hundreds of military mechs, from racks of FENRIS models near the ceiling to huge arrays of the standard LOKI model along the container's walls. They were all in their compact, hunkered-down mode, but Erash still didn't like being around them. For one thing, they were all armed with a standard Viceroy submachine gun, grasped tightly in metal hands even in sleep mode. They were obviously being shipped in for some major planned conflict; this was more than just shoring up numbers, and the markings on the exterior of the crate indicated that its contents belonged entirely to the Eclipse. Giving Eclipse hundreds of heavily-armed robots was, Erash knew from painful experience, often an extremely bad idea for everyone involved. _Every month they issue a new patch which promises that friendly fire is a thing of the past, and every month the casualty figures rise. At least that's not a problem for me any more._

Sidonis was standing still, staring at the YMIR mechs stacked at the very end of the crate. "Do you think," he said, "that Garrus would let us have one of those?"

"You want an YMIR mech," Erash said flatly.

"Yeah!"

"_Why?_"

"I bet Sensat could convert it so it had, like, a saddle. And then you could ride it around and blow shit up."

Erash shook his head in disbelief. "You are a very sick individual."

"And you're no fun."

"Maybe going by _your_ definition of fun," Erash said. "Of course, for you it seems to be synonymous with 'insanity'."

"Like I said. You're no fun."

"Then I'll take that as a compliment. Let's go."

"Ah, you're right," Sidonis said, and turned away from the YMIRs. "It would never work. You'd be too exposed. What you need is one to be built around you-"

"We already have one of those," Erash said. "It's called 'Melenis'. You might have seen him around."

"I know, but _I_ want one. I want to be a cyborg."

"I can't believe I'm even having this conversation," Erash said, and turned off his mag-boots to jet himself out of the container. He was almost out when something caught his eye, and he quickly brought himself to a stop with his reverse thrusters. Sidonis had been following him too close to stop in time, and crashed into his back

"What the fuck?" Sidonis complained, extricating himself. "What are you-"

Erash ignored him and pushed himself up, floating gently upwards until he was near the roof of the crate. In front of him was a LOKI mech in its usual compact position, but the two red rings that made up the mech's 'face' were both on.

On every single other mech in the container, they were off.

"Erash?" Sidonis said. "What's up?"

"This one's on," Erash murmured, reaching out to poke the mech's head. "Huh. Must be a defective model."

He sent himself back down with another burst of his thrusters, coming down next to Sidonis.

"Or maybe they're all about to come online and kill us," Sidonis offered.

"Could be," Erash said, and headed for the exit. He couldn't shake the odd feeling that it hadn't just been a glitch; LOKI mechs were usually pretty solid in terms of hardware, even if their actual programming left a lot to be desired. He was on the threshold of the container when the urge became overpowering, and he looked over his shoulder. Sidonis followed his gaze.

The crate was a forest of red lights. Hundreds of them had ignited along every wall, and even as Erash looked on in mute horror more and more were flicking on everywhere. Small circles for the LOKIs and FENRISes, larger ones as the YMIRs came to life. An ice-cold chill wandered down Erash's spine.

_You just had to say it, didn't you..._

The lowest rank of LOKI mechs began to unfurl themselves from their storage state. LOKIs may have been cheap, low-quality models, but they were required to work in dozens of different gravity levels to allow their use out on frontier worlds... and that meant that they knew how to deal with zero-g. Their mag-boots snapped down noiselessly onto the floor, and two dozen robots turned towards them in unison.

"Did you touch anything?" Sidonis whispered.

Erash licked his lips. "No. Did you?"

"No."

"Ah. Then we have a problem."

A hail of bullets came storming towards them and sent them stumbling back as the projectiles fizzed out silently against their shields, finally galvanising Erash enough to snap out of it and hurl himself out of the open crate, using his jets to get himself out of the line of fire before the shields failed.

"Fucking _hell_," Sidonis wailed. Erash looked around, but he couldn't see him. "What the fuck was that?"

"Somebody turned those on," Erash snapped. "We need to warn the others. Switch to the main channel and do it. I might be able to blow the crate-"

He was too slow; even as he said it, the first of the LOKIs emerged from the crate, walking straight out into space. They had no thrusters, but they could still shoot, forcing Erash to jet away again, taking cover behind a crate as it floated past. The only indication he had that he was being shot at were the short darts of light as mass-accelerated bullets shot all around the crate.

"Problem!" Sidonis called. "Oh, we have a problem here!"

Erash stuck his head out to see precisely which of the several major problems that had just emerged Sidonis was referring to, and paled as the first YMIR mech marched out of the container and into the forming mass of LOKIs. Its thrusters activated, sending it straight through them and scattering mechs like confetti just as the second one came out, crushing several unfortunate LOKIs beneath its huge feet as it did. Its head swung towards him.

Erash's hand dropped to his pistol.

It seemed rather inadequate.


	33. An Eye For An Eye: Intervention

**AN EYE FOR AN EYE**

**FIVE: INTERVENTION**

* * *

"What the hell do you mean they just turned on?" Garrus snarled, looking wildly around for rogue mechs. "What did you do?"

"I didn't do a fucking thing," Sidonis said venomously. "Now get your ass over here and start _fucking helping us!_"

"Seconded," Erash said. "In fact- oh, that can't be good-"

"We're on our way," Garrus said. He activated his thrusters with a flick of his eye and jetted back towards the markers on his map which indicated Sidonis and Erash's position, dodging crates and batting away loose guns as he went. To his left, Weaver was keeping pace, although his suit's design meant that his thrust came almost entirely from his boots, leaving him looking like one of the superheroes Earth media seemed to be so fond of. "Luc, Sensat, you hearing this?"

Sensat's voice crackled onto the line. "Yes. We've just finished. We'll rejoin you shortly."

Garrus drew his rifle and unfolded it, bringing it to his shoulder as he ducked under a heavy container. A few minutes ago, he'd have been very consciously predicting its flight and adjusting his own movement; now, the adrenalin surge was already kicking in, leaving him going on instinct alone and dodging obstacles like they were nothing. "Good. Stay in cover until we're there."

"Never a bloody dull moment with you, is there?" Weaver muttered.

Ahead of Garrus, through the vast cloud of loose crates and equipment swirling from floor to ceiling, there were visible flashes of gunfire flickering through the debris like lightning behind storm clouds, all eerily silent. The only sounds were Sidonis and Erash shouting back and forth about their positions and incoming threats, and Garrus suddenly realised just how much any soldier relied on his hearing. It would tell him where his enemies were, what they were doing, when they were firing or reloading or talking to each other... and they wouldn't have any of that.

_This is going to be... interesting._

"Melenis," he said. "You there?"

"Receiving. I am on my way."

"Good man," Garrus said, and emerged into a roughly clear space in the chaos. It took him a moment to mentally readjust; the mechs were seemingly pouring straight downwards out of their house-sized container, but without gravity, everything was relative. The number of them was terrifying; he counted four YMIR heavies, but they were encased in a swarm of LOKIs and FENRISes in numbers beyond counting. Dozens were already scrap, either from friendly fire or what Sidonis and Erash had managed to do, but there was a steady torrent of new mechs marching out into space from the end of that container, firing as they went.

"About damn time you got here," Erash said through audibly gritted teeth. Garrus glanced at his map to locate him and found him about ten metres 'below' him and over to the right, clinging to the side of a slowly rotating crate for cover. About half of the fire from the mechs was being directed towards him, with the rest aimed at another few crates Sidonis was presumably hiding behind, but some of the mechs had picked up Garrus's approach and turned their guns on him.

He swore under his breath and jetted up, finding targets as he went; LOKIs were cheap pieces of crap at the best of times, and these models didn't even have shields. His rifle silently bucked twice against his shoulder, shattering the heads of a pair of mechs and sending the limp remains cartwheeling away, but there was still fire following him. His breath rattled in his helmet, the only sound despite the bullets sparking around him, but there was still time to pick off another before the first shots slammed against his shield and forced him to grab cover behind a nearby crate.

"Do we have a clear way to the ship?" he asked.

"We've got the cover," Sidonis said. "Plus we've got the jets. We can get around them."

Garrus leaned out of cover to survey the situation just in time to see a dazzling blossom of pure white light appear for half an instant and then disappear, leaving him blinking furiously even with his visor's automatic polarisation dampening the effect of the explosion. In an atmosphere, the grenade Erash had thrown would have been a recognisable explosion, but in a vacuum all there was to see was that momentary blast of light and the scattering debris of a dozen obliterated mechs.

Weaver's laugh rang loudly over the comm line. "Bastards felt that one!"

"I think you might be right," Erash said smugly. Garrus took the opportunity afforded by the momentary disorientation of the expanding cloud of mechs to line up a few more shots; this time, he popped five heads before an YMIR noticed him and directed a railgun his way, forcing him back down. _To hell with the Nightspike. I love this rifle!_

"We're almost with you," Sensat reported. "Is the rendezvous secure?"

Garrus glanced at his map, checking who was in a position to see. "Weaver?"

"Way looks clear," Weaver said. "We should be-"

"Oh, shit!" Butler suddenly yelped. "We have incoming! Garrus!"

"I heard you, I heard you!" Garrus snapped, then grimaced as a couple of bullets caught his exposed leg, failing to get past the barriers but still hurting like hell. He tried to drag it back in, but his position was untenable; there was too much turian and too little crate. "Define 'incoming'."

"It just came into sensor range, but it's fast," Butler said, speaking very quickly. "It's bigger than us, too. ETA of three minutes."

"We only picked it up three minutes out?" Erash said incredulously. "How fast is that thing going?"

"They must have activated the mechs," Garrus said, although he knew he was just stating the obvious. "It's Williams."

"Time for round two," Weaver said. "Happy days!"

Garrus curled a lip in consternation and clambered out of cover, moving around the crate like a heavily-armed spider. Memories of watching what had been left of Saren doing much the same thing flickered briefly in the recesses of his mind, but they were quickly dispelled by the sight of not one, but two YMIR mechs jetting slowly towards him, guns at the ready.

_Well. This will be fun._

He launched himself away towards a larger container, a three-metre cube which looked like it offered better protection despite the fact that it had burst open, spilling whatever its contents had been, but the guns tracked him and opened fire. The advantage of zero-g was that it meant all motion was perfectly smooth, allowing Garrus to easily compensate for his movement and accurately return fire, and he fired seven shots in quick succession. Six of them hit their target, the closest YMIR's cranial module, with four silently evaporating against its heavy shields and the last two smashing past them to drill two messy holes clean through the mech's head. His own shields failed him with about a metre to go until safety, but he'd been lucky; the YMIR's loss of its main core had triggered the near-universal manufacturing error of inducing immediate self-destruct – _and they have the gall to claim it's a useful security feature –_ and the ensuing white fireball had knocked the other mech off course, sending its fire wildly away as Garrus gratefully stalled himself behind the crate.

"Garrus, what do I do?" Butler said, his voice edged with panic. "They'll destroy the ship unless I leave _right now, _but you're all still over there-"

"Right now?"

"They're too damn close for us to get away unless- well, it's too late now," Butler said. "I'm abandoning the ship."

Garrus hissed through his teeth at that, but he knew it was the right choice. "Suit up and get out of there," he said, and slotted a fresh thermal clip into his rifle. As he closed it, it seemed as if something had gone wrong before he remembered that the satisfying hiss it normally created was absent in the vacuum. "Shame to leave it, but we have no choice."

"We can't leave the ship!" Sidonis said. "I still had half a crate of beer on there!"

"Your sacrifice will not be forgotten, Sidonis," Erash said sepulchrally.

"I mean, it was cheap and warm, but it's still beer."

"Sidonis, if you shut up," Garrus said, "I will personally buy you enough alcohol to kill you several times over."

"Deal," Sidonis said instantly.

_I wonder if he thinks he can hold me to that?_

"We need to take out these bloody YMIRs," Weaver grunted. "I'm pinned down."

"I think I can help," Monteague said. "Give me covering fire."

Garrus rolled out of cover and began unloading almost at random, taking any targets he could. The ranks of the LOKIs were thinning at least a little, but there were still dozens of them wheeling through the air, firing as they went. It was an almost comical sight, but the bullets were real enough, and a couple of stray shots impacted against Garrus's barriers as he fired back. He brought down three LOKIs and a FENRIS, with his other shots serving only to get the attention of the YMIRs' threat detection systems; there were still eight of the heavy mechs active, although one seemed to have lost functionality on one side, and at least three of them began silently swinging round towards him.

That was the opportunity Monteague was looking for; Garrus caught a quick flash of his jets through the cloud of mechs and their debris, then an electric blue flash rippled quickly through the air. It caught one of the YMIRs around its head and tightened around it like a noose, then twisted it half off, leaving it attached by a few sparking wires. The mech stiffened and stopped moving, its jets sending it into a slow forward somersault – and barely a second later, as Garrus started to move back into cover, the damaged one exploded with a noiseless white flash, seemingly for no reason.

"Who did _that?_" Erash asked.

"I did," Sensat said. "Its firewalls were down."

"Nice shot, Luc," Weaver said.

"Thanks," Monteague replied.

There was an bizarrely calm tone to the firefight, Garrus thought, as he slipped another clip into his rifle. More than that, it was downright surreal. People didn't have to shout over gunfire, and so much of the excitement and passion stemmed from the noise that without it, everyone was speaking simply and conversationally. _And I'm able to sit here and think about this stuff, which says a lot. The battlefield's usually not a great place for psychological analysis._

"Wait, I have to jump across?" Butler said hollowly a few seconds later. _Ah. I know that feeling._ "Jump. Through space."

"What's the worst that could happen?" Erash said. "Actually... no, ignore that. Forget I said anything."

"Goddamn fantastic," Butler muttered.

"Try to think about other things," Garrus said helpfully. "Like the ship full of people coming to kill us which will be here in ninety seconds."

"You know what? Fuck you both!"

Garrus grinned inside his helmet and jetted up. The advantage of fighting mechs was that it was easy to get into a pattern they wouldn't adjust to; their electronic brains were far too cheap to handle anything like predicting what he might do next, and it was simple to pop up, take his shots and vanish behind cover before they could retaliate in force.

That was the theory, anyway, and it was proven wrong when, seconds after he'd ducked back behind his crate, the whole thing jerked forwards and smashed into his back, knocking the wind out of him and sending him tumbling away with the crate in hot pursuit. Dazed, he scrabbled for the manual jet controls on his omnitool and flicked them to full power, sending him out of the way of several tonnes of metal just before it would have crushed him against an even heavier container.

"Hey, Garrus," Sidonis said. "You still alive?"

Garrus brought his movement under control and shook his head to clear the bright spots behind his eyes before answering. "Yeah. What the hell was that?"

"Missile," Weaver said. "That looked nasty."

"It felt it," Garrus said, trying to rub the back of his head, which had had a brief, passionate affair with the incoming crate. His helmet felt slightly dented to the touch. _Ow._ "We need to to regroup, and fast. We can't let them land troops in here while we're split up."

"Agreed," Erash said. "But – I don't know if you noticed – there are these mechs all over the place, and they're not in a helpful mood."

Garrus tapped a few commands into his omnitool, setting a waypoint on the 3D map of the _Starfucker._ "Can anybody not make it there?"

"I can't," Weaver said, "not without a few more YMIRs down-"

"Hello, Weaver," a completely different voice said. It seemed perfectly amicable, but the peculiar diamond-edge to it was unmistakeable. _Williams._ "I see you're back. My fault, really. I stood there and boasted at you when I could have just put a bullet through that thick old skull of yours, and now you're here to make my life a misery again."

"Butler?" Garrus said, switching to an individual frequency. "What the _hell_ is he doing on our line?"

"I don't know!" Butler said. "I was running comms through the ship, he, he must have got through without me there to stop him-"

Garrus cursed under his breath and switched back to the main channel, where Weaver was now speaking.

"-kill you myself. You know that."

"Seems we have very different definitions of 'knowledge', then," Williams said affably. "Still, I won't hold it against you. I _could_ just vaporise you from here, but then I'd lose that lovely ship full of expensive goodies, and that wouldn't be good at all. I might even get a little fucking upset. So, prepare to be boarded. If you'd like to kill yourselves now and save me the bother, that would be great."

"Your mechs are pretty crap for 'expensive'," Garrus said, rolling out of cover to take a few more potshots at stray LOKIs. "And your men didn't put up much of a fight last time."

"Ah, Weaver's mysterious new friend, I take it?" Williams said. "I didn't expect the mechs to do much – other than short the Eclipse order – but you seem to have made short work of most of 're an irritating little bugger, you know."

"I try."

"I don't believe I know any turians well enough for them to want me dead for personal reasons," Williams went on, "so I assume it's professional. Who are you working for?"

"The people with nobody else working for them," Garrus said.

"An idealist! Wonderful! I don't suppose you're the famous Archangel, are you?"

"Archangel's just a name."

"So it is. I intend to prove just that."

"Try us," Weaver said. "Just fucking try us."

"I'll do more than that, my old friend," Williams said, in a voice like a knife wrapped in velvet. "I'll fucking kill you. _Mate. _But until then, enjoy this surprise."

_What surprise?_

Williams left the line, and a couple of seconds later Butler spoke.

"I've got a secure new line up, run locally, but I think-"

His voice dissolved into static, and Garrus blinked as his omnitool and visor both went offline.

_Oh, that is **not** good._

The strip lighting on what would have been the ceiling if Garrus hadn't been at a ninety degree angle to it flickered once, then died. Darkness fell over the entire ship. The rifle in Garrus's hands vanished before his eyes.

_That's even worse._

"Anybody still receiving?" he said. Nobody replied. _Comms down too?_

He recognised the signs all too well. It was a full EMP, or something like it; it had killed every single piece of technology in its firing arc, and it would take at least minutes and probably hours to get it back online. It was practically useless in military conflicts because of the extreme short range, necessity of heavy equipment and danger of doing as much damage to your own forces as it did to the enemy – and most high-grade military equipment was built to withstand it anyway.

Garrus didn't have high-grade military equipment any more. The Alliance had made him give it back. This presented a problem.

A single light faded up in front of him, a small orange screen displaying a few numbers. The glow from it was enough to faintly delineate the shape of the rifle in his lifted it to his shoulder and fired a test round, sending a streak of bluish light spearing into the darkness.

_The Needle's more resilient than I thought. I should buy Armax more often._

He tested the manual controls for his jets under a plate on his gauntlet. Nothing happened.

_And ERCS less often. On the bright side, that pulse will have wiped their mechs' computers cleaner than a quarian's cutlery. On the less bright side, I can't even get around easily._

He tried his mag-boots. They were still working, anchoring him to the crate he'd been taking cover behind.

_On the other hand... the only light I'm emitting is from this gun. If I turn the screen off, they'll have trouble seeing me even if they have night-vision, whereas I can look for their lights._

_That might just work._

A quick burst of light shone through the debris for a split second, casting hundreds of twisted shadows across the ship before vanishing as suddenly as it had come. _Gunfire? That means someone else still has a gun working- wait. What happened to Melenis? He can't survive losing his tech-_

The question was answered by another, different blast of light; this one stayed on, its source sending a brilliant white glow through the gently drifting maze of parts and crates, but the source wasn't what drew the eye. Hundreds of letters had appeared on one surface of the ship – what had once been the ceiling, by the looks of it – shining a bright white in the darkness. There was too much in the way for Garrus to clearly see what it said, so he ended up abandoning cover and blindly pushing his way through until he found a spot from where he could see it all.

The same message was repeated five times: once in each of the respective official languages of the Hierarchy, Union and Alliance, once in what looked like another human language Garrus didn't recognise, and once in the arch, rigid script of some batarian language. At first, Garrus didn't understand why it was repeated, but then he realised that even the translators they took for granted on an everyday basis were down.

The text read: _**THIS IS MELENIS. SOME SYSTEMS STILL UP. ASSUMING AM ONLY ONE COMMUNICATING. AM TEMPORARILY TAKING COMMAND. ALL MECHS DOWN. SCATTER. GO DARK. HIDE. WAIT FOR ENEMY TO SPLIT UP. STRIKE QUICKLY AND UNNOTICED. IF POSSIBLE, FIND RIFLES.**_

The message covered nearly thirty horizontal metres of the ship in just the turian language, and with the repetition it spread half that vertically as well. Garrus read through it in under four seconds, and smiled thinly at the last sentence. _Already got that covered._

He glanced around him, looking for the others. Melenis was visible through the debris as a round shape glowing with the light from the projection, and he caught sight of some of the others emerging from the sea of wrecked mechs and crates as ill-defined silhouettes, floating gently upwards in utter silence like moths towards light. The sight was surreal; they looked like phantoms and might as well have been for all he could do to interact with them.

The light flicked off, leaving them in utter darkness. A second or so later, it switched back on, except now the text was much more concise and far larger, the letters stretching several metres high. Now it simply read: _**GOOD HUNTING.**_

That message stayed there for five seconds, then blackness descended once more, broken only by that faint glimmer of his rifle's HUD. He reached forwards and deactivated it.

_If they think we'll be easy prey, then they've got another thing coming._

It felt oddly liberating. He was free from having to worry about what everyone else was doing and whether he was doing the right thing for them; all he had was a rifle and a lot of targets. Either he shot them, or they shot him. The binary simplicity of it was beautiful, and not for the first time he wondered if he'd have been better off if he'd cut and run after Deinech, going back to working alone on Omega. True, he couldn't have done anything like as much on his own, but something about the total self-dependence appealed to him more than it should.

For now, he pushed away off a heavy crate and sent himself into the debris field, keeping his armoured forearms up to deflect objects in his path. Total darkness surrounded him. Every impact was unforeseeable, the obstacles invisible even as they bounced off his helmet. They hurt.

After a few seconds, he came up against one of the bigger crates, and switched on his mag-boots. When he was securely in place, he shifted into a half-crouch, half-prone position to minimise his size as a visible target, and brought his rifle to his shoulder. He brought up its haptic display again and entered a few commands, changing parameters and disregarding safety settings. The Needle was easily customised, and by the time his screen went dark again he was holding a rifle which would have a hell of a kick and burn through thermal clips faster than he'd like, but would punch through barrier, armour and whatever lay beneath without much trouble.

A minute passed in silence and darkness, measured by counting his breaths. They were slower than they had any right to be.

Then, lights were suddenly visible, away to his left. He shifted position around towards them, watching them carefully. He caught the briefest glimpse of stars past the breach in the freighter's hull before something drifted in front of it, blocking the view, but he could still pick out some of the lights. They were faint: omnitools and HUDs, by the look of them, but in the utter blackness they might as well have been searchlights.

He held his breath and waited. If one of them saw him through whatever night-vision tech they were using, he was most likely a dead man. Even if he survived it, it would be a sure sign that taking refuge among the crates wasn't going to work; in essence, if they were using thermal detectors powerful enough to penetrate his armour's defences against that kind of imaging, their advantage was too great. If, as was more likely, they weren't – _and I know men like Williams, he wouldn't waste good gear on his cannon fodder if he thought he could get a good price for it –_ then the chance was still there.

The lights began to spread out. They stayed in clusters of three or so, allowing Garrus to make a rough estimate of numbers: it looked like about twenty or so.

_Manageable._

He waited, and waited. The lights were joined by tiny blue flecks that flickered on and off around them. _Jets._

They began to spread out away from each other, though still grouped into loose clusters. One in particular caught his eye, moving closer to him as the others dissipated and vanished into the debris. There were three definite shapes there, the very edges of their armour illuminated ever so slightly by the infinitesimal glow of their 'tools and displays, a few metres between each of them. Looking down the scope of his rifle, he could make a good headshot on at least two of them even without target assistance, but they seemed to be looking in his general direction. If possible, he was going to wait until they wouldn't be able to identify the origin of the shot, and that meant he had to wait for them to pass him.

It was a horrible thirty seconds as they drifted slowly closer. Garrus knew from experience that even night-vision was of little use in a totally black environment; there was no use in brightening the surroundings if there was little to no light there in the first place, and he was hopeful that his armour's hard-built heat bleeders and wells were enough to make its exterior look stone cold to any thermal sensors. That didn't help; every time a light swung his way, his heart leapt into his mouth and his every instinct screamed that he had to open fire and flee, but he stayed still and steady.

One of them came within what seemed like three or four metres of him, though occasional disappearances of the lights told him there was still cover in the form of the debris all around him. He knew it was pointless, but he held his breath anyway. He could have screamed bloody murder and they would still have been equally oblivious to him.

They passed him and moved on, heading up and away to his right. He let out a long breath of relief and steadied himself, taking aim again. One of them was lagging slightly behind the others, presenting a tempting target, and Garrus lined up a shot. He couldn't see the head, but he could work out where it had to be in relation to those parts he _could_ see.

His finger was tightening around the trigger when a distant flash shone through the crates for a millisecond, spawning a thousand monstrous shadows before darkness returned. The lights Garrus had been watching came to a stop and turned towards the source of the flash, their jets firing away. _Somebody's calling for help, which means that little light show was the start of the shooting. I wonder who fired the first shot?_

Again, as the three figures began urgently heading in the other direction, one was slightly slower. The gap was only about five metres, but it might as well have been a thousand times that for all the good his friends could do for him if Garrus made the shot.

He lined it up, squeezed the trigger, and made it.

The rifle slammed back into his shoulder like a piston. It would have knocked him heavily off balance if he hadn't been anchored down by his mag-boots, but the shot had been true; the collection of lights which had been one of Williams' men jerked and began tumbling into a slow spin away, the air leaking from the hole in his helmet adding to the propulsion like an antique steam engine. His friends didn't notice right away despite the brightness of the flash; they seemed to be distracted by something, and a series of similar flashes told Garrus what it was. They seemed to come from all around him and, for all he knew about his team's positions, they were.

The flashes were staccato, but that was nothing compared to what came next. Guns everywhere began silently spitting fire into the darkness, creating a constant strobe of ice-blue light throughout the ship. _This would make for a great nightclub. If only I had my music..._

One of the fallen trooper's companions seemed to have realised that he was no longer with them, and had turned back alone to look for him. '_Never leave a man behind' again. At the Academy, they always told us it was a stupid idea._

The returning man caught sight of his fallen companion's lights spinning away into the dark and began to move after him, then caught himself and turned just in time to get a bullet through his visor. The recoil hammered into Garrus again, and another body began drifting away, taking the same course as that of his colleague. _If you go back for the fallen, more often than not you'll end up joining them. But if you leave them, you'll always wonder if you could have saved them._

_Why do I always pick the worst times to philosophise?_

Those two shots alone had exhausted his thermal clip, but instead of just leaving it to fall away as he usually did, he grabbed hold of it and threw it out in front of him so it wouldn't give away his position. It bounced off something unseen and span away, its red glow rapidly fading as he reloaded.

The gunfire was less frequent now, though whether it was due to there being fewer combatants left or to the realisation that spraying fire was worse than useless he couldn't say. He twisted around until he sighted on another group of lights, squinting through the blue flashes as guns silently unloaded into the darkness all around him. The flickering light revealed a figure there, his outline vague but still visible through thirty metres of debris.

It took him three or four seconds to steady himself enough to get a clear shot at him, and then another couple to wait for a crate to drift out of the way. The guy was moving, but not quickly enough to find safety.

This time, the bullet went straight through his chestplate. Garrus watched dispassionately as the merc flailed, futilely trying to somehow plug the hole in his suit through which an icy plume of air was pouring. The bullet was fatal even if his body hadn't realised it yet, and within twenty seconds his motion slowed and then finally stopped.

_Scoped and dropped._

There was still no fire coming his way, or at least none which was actually directed at him personally. In the distance, he could see a fusillade of flashes and dense stream of bullet trails which could only come from Weaver's Revenant, while closer to him on his left he caught a brief glimpse of what had to be Melenis darting through the vacuum, bizarrely graceful for such a huge, lumbering body. Nobody else was immediately visible, and he seemed to have wiped out all the resistance in his area, so he deactivated his mag-boots and pushed off again. This time, the light meant that he could at least see the crates looming up before they smashed into his head, but he still took several painful hits before he emerged into a tiny clearing with a set of telltale lights visible nearby.

He couldn't quite get a clear shot at first, but that changed when a sudden ghostly blue glow lit up around the figure and sent him tumbling head over heels, his jets firing uselessly as he went. Garrus took advantage of the moment to put his eye to his scope and take the shot. It was a difficult one; the merc was moving at a fair pace and only his midriff was staying in roughly the same place as he rotated, limbs flailing wildly. It wasn't a perfect hit, punching through shield and armour to shred the merc's stomach – a non-lethal injury in most situations, but with the difficulty of applying medigel and the rapid loss of suit pressurisation in play, he was a dead man. _I should thank Luc for that one later._

He was beginning to realise just how much of a miscalculation Williams and his men had made in bringing down the lights. Their guns all seemed to have survived the pulse, and furthermore Williams' group were clearly incapable of identifying targets in the dark. For their troubles, they were being massacred.

The next time a target drifted into sight, Garrus's reaction was mechanically instinctive. One second to drop the clip and replace it, another to sight, a third to confirm. By the end of the fourth, another corpse was tumbling through the vacuum, perfectly round globules of brain leaking out of its shattered helmet. He'd been near a colleague, who responded by firing blindly in Garrus's general direction. A couple of shots impacted against Garrus's shields and knocked him off balance as he fired, sending his shot ricocheting wide, but he was quick to reload. The second time, he made no mistake.

_Six down, and they haven't even landed a proper hit on me. Are they even trying?_

He didn't even shift his position. There was no real point; his position wasn't compromised in the least because their enemies were simply incapable of seeing them. Their technology was failing them, and worse still giving away _their_ positions. Even as Garrus scanned around for a new target, he saw another group of lights shredded by heavy assault rifle fire from two directions at once, while the first potential target he laid eyes on turned out to be already dead, the blood pouring out of the crater in his chest shining in the gunfire's strobe light.

The fight was already won. He realised it with a sharp thrill of pride, and for good reason; they'd taken on a better-equipped, more numerous enemy in constant radio contact while they'd been left without even a flashlight between them, and had not just won but had utterly annihilated them. He caught himself before he got too self-congratulatory and forced his mind back to wrapping up the battle – _wouldn't it be a wonderful irony to be blown away in the middle of preening about how complete our victory is?_ - but for the life of him he couldn't see any targets left. The gunfire agreed with him; it came to a total halt for the first time in five minutes, and that oppressively complete darkness returned with a vengeance.

_Is that it?_

He scanned the area again, then pushed away from the crate he'd been braced against to look for any other telltale lights. He twisted and contorted himself to get a good look at the entire ship, but the only lights he could see were obviously attached to corpses.

_I think that's it._

He glanced down at his omnitool and tried activating it again. It was still out of action, but he didn't need to see it to know that he'd probably have no more than about half an hour of air left. He wondered whether their corvette had been outright destroyed or just shunted out of the way by Williams' vessel. Either way, it was probably irretrievable, and they could take Williams' ship anyway-

_Unless they leave. There'll be techies and pilots still aboard..._

He looked around once more, this time not searching for targets but for the way out. Without his omnitool's map, he couldn't easily identify it; he'd lost track entirely of where he was in relation to the rest of the ship, and he had no way of working it out without his tech. He cursed under his breath and made a decision, pushing off and away towards the corpse which had drifted past a few moments ago.

Shouldering his rifle, he grabbed it and ripped the still-active omnitool out of its socket, pushing the body away again. For a moment, he thought it was broken, but then he realised: the strange text covering the 'tool's display wasn't the result of a glitch, but was human writing. His translators were still down, and without them the omnitool was unusable. He had an extremely basic grounding in English, the official Alliance language, but although this language used a similar writing system he couldn't identify any of the words.

_Damn._

He tried tapping random icons, getting more text and strings of meaningless numbers for his trouble. He was about to give up when suddenly the display turned into an orange 3D sphere after he pressed what looked like a globe icon, but it looked to be blank until he noticed a tiny green pixel in the lower hemisphere, the only feature on the display. He peered closer, and saw that it seemed to be moving.

_Green. What does that signify in human colour schemes? They use red for enemies and don't use blue at all, so it has to mean... friendlies._

_One of them's still alive._

Somehow he knew with perfect certainty that it would be Williams.

_If he gets back to the ship..._

"Hell," he muttered, and tried to work out roughly where the marker was in relation to him. It seemed to be above him and to his right, but he couldn't make out any telltale lights. _Obscured or off?_ He pushed off from a nearby crate, sending it floating away behind him, and went straight into the thickest part of the debris field. The glow of his stolen omnitool illuminated the head of a deactivated LOKI mech sailing past him and a bevy of crates in his path, and it took him a few precious seconds to pick his way through and launch off again into a mercifully clearer section. The green icon was directly ahead of him and he was definitely closing, but he still couldn't see any sign of a figure ahead.

He flinched as another flash of gunfire lit up the ship and the unmistakeable streak of a rifle bullet shot silently past him, missing by barely a metre. For half a second, he thought that another of Williams' men had survived, but then he realised that he would be marked on his map. Somebody else was shooting at him, and there weren't a whole lot of possibilities there. _Oh, I am __**not**__ going to get killed by friendly fire. Am I? That's just not fair!_

Another shot flashed past him, far too close for his liking, and then another slammed into his shields. They held – barely, and he mentally blessed Elanus for making their armours' barriers run on isolated, EMP-proofed circuits. _I'll never complain about them being overpriced again._

He crashed through a pair of crates and launched himself yet again, throwing every ounce of his strength into it. Several more shots blasted past him, though they were more inaccurate than the last few. As he sailed onwards, something drifted out of his way just in time to reveal the floor of the freighter perpendicular to him, and another wild shot from behind him illuminated it just enough to show him the ladder back to where they'd made the hull breach. The map seemed to be indicating that Williams was already past this point and back to his ship, and he was practically sprinting by the time he got his mag-boots on the floor.

Another rifle shot smashed into his shields as he descended the ladder, but they'd recharged enough to take almost all the sting out of the shot, leaving the bullet to bounce harmlessly off his helmet. The force of it against his shields still dazed him for a couple of seconds, but by then he was shielded by the flooring of the freighter. Looking around, he saw that Williams' ship had docked more neatly than they had, extending a docking tube into the breach, and he ran towards it. The door opened automatically, leaving him in an airlock.

The cycle time was fast, but the seconds ticked past agonisingly slowly nonetheless. He glanced at the omnitool still clutched tightly in his hand; the icon was now stationary, and from what he remembered of human numerals, the scale indicated that it was very, very close.

The circular door slid apart to reveal a standard metal corridor. By his feet lay a discarded helmet. There was human blood on the floor; a few metres ahead of him there was an obvious splatter mark where someone had been shot, and past that there were spotted streaks of the stuff leading up to the intersection ahead. He could make out some bloody footprints as well; whoever had been shot had tried to keep going.

_Is someone else here?_

He followed the trail up to the corner with his rifle at the ready. He could hear a voice ahead, speaking in English, but too fast and too colloquially for him to understand it.

He rounded the corner, his finger on the trigger, and found Williams.

He wasn't alone. Williams was kneeling on the floor, blood seeping through his light armour on his left thigh and starting to pool around his feet. His uncovered hair was slick with sweat, the curls drooping and darkening, and his head was bowed. Aimed down at his head was a pistol, and holding the pistol was Weaver, whose own helmet was lying by his feet. Garrus lowered his rifle as both men looked towards him.

"_Huh. Didn't think anyone else had seen the bastard escaping,_" Weaver said, but Garrus didn't understand him. He took off his helmet and said as much, knowing it would get the idea across anyway.

"_What- oh, yeah. The tech thing,_" Weaver said. "_If I might, Gus-_"

He reached down and tore Williams' omnitool out of his gauntlet, still holding the gun to his head, and pressed a few buttons.

"Understand me now?" the 'tool said in the official Hierarchy language, after Weaver spoke into it in English. Like regular translators, it produced a perfect simulacrum of Weaver's voice, complete with inflection and tone.

"Perfectly," Garrus replied, and waited as the device translated it again. It sounded odd to hear his own voice speaking in English.

"The wonders of technology," Weaver deadpanned. "You nearly gave us the slip there, Gus-old-boy. How did you survive? Did you hide behind your men as we slaughtered them, or did you just run?"

"What's the matter, Weaver? Having second thoughts about killing me?" Williams said sneeringly. "Or maybe you're just toying with me. I'd do the same. We're more alike than-"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, spare me the 'we're not so different' speech, will you?" Weaver said, rolling his eyes. "Do you honestly think you can get to me like that?"

"Yes," Williams said. "Because I'm right. Kill me and be done with it. You've destroyed everything I had anyway."

"Some might call that justice," Weaver said. "An eye for an eye. You know, I'm tempted to deliver you to the merc groups so you can explain where their guns and their money are. I hear that Tarak can keep a man alive for days."

"Are you trying to scare me?" Williams said incredulously. "I'm already dead, Weaver. Between you, your Archangel _friend_" - he spat the word like it was poison - "and my valued customers, there's no surviving this for me."

"You don't sound all that worried about it," Garrus said.

Williams turned towards him and bared his teeth in what might once have been a grin. "Everybody dies, Archangel. Even angels fall. And it's only when you fall that you see just how much you had, and how much you've lost."

"Poetry," Weaver said. "I shed a single tear at your noble spirit."

"How long until you join me, Weaver?" Williams said. "A year? Two? Life's a fragile thing. I killed your friends, you killed mine."

"You never had any friends."

"True. They were tools, just as your 'friends' are to you. You're using Archangel for your revenge on me, not out of some great ideal of justice. Everything is about you. I know you, Weaver. Like I said, we're the same underneath."

"I'm not like you," Weaver said through gritted teeth.

"Don't try to escape it. The only thing of worth to anybody is themselves. There's no such thing as 'other people'. Just props and tools."

Weaver glanced down at him, and Garrus could see the disgust on his face and his finger tightening on the trigger.

"Come on," Williams whispered. "Do it. Kill me."

A few seconds passed in silence. Then:

"...no," Weaver said. He took the gun away from Williams' head and turned towards Garrus. He held out the gun to him, butt first. "It's one of his smuggled weapons."

"Fitting," Garrus said, shouldering his rifle. As he took the pistol, he looked Weaver in the eye, and he could see exactly how hard it had been for him to tear himself away from his revenge – but the anger seemed to have drained away, and simple, steely determination had replaced it in its entirety. He looked oddly peaceful.

"No," Williams said. He tried to get up, but his leg gave out underneath him and sent him sprawling with a shout of pain. "No! Come back! Kill me, you _fucking coward!_"

"I don't have to," Weaver said, without turning. "I don't even want to. You don't deserve it."

Williams half-extended a hand, but then let it drop. "I don't..." he said brokenly, looking up at Garrus as he advanced towards him. "I don't... understand..."

"It's simple," Garrus said, and levelled the pistol at his head. "He could have had revenge. Now, we have justice. He's not like you."

Williams stared at him for a second, and then suddenly, as if he'd reached some realisation, fear flooded his eyes. "Wait! Don't-"

Garrus shot him in the head and turned back to Weaver. Behind him, Williams' body slumped to the floor.

"You know," he said, "that's the third time I've executed a raving madman as he begged me not to do it."

"That's not a bad record to have, really," Weaver said with a shrug. "I'd be proud of it."

"Enough to make you wish you'd killed him?"

"Are you kidding? Did you _see_ how much that destroyed him? If I'd known that was going to happen, I'd have wanted you to kill him from the beginning!"

Garrus snorted in amusement. "I guess sometimes justice makes for even better revenge than revenge."

"Still," Weaver said more seriously, looking past Garrus at the body, "you were right. It wouldn't have been justice if I'd killed him."

"It could have been, if you'd let go of the revenge."

"I tried to."

"I know."

"Did I?"

"Yes."

"Oh, well, that was easy," Weaver said, his face suddenly breaking into a grin. "So I'm a paragon of justice now, am I?"

"Well, let's not go nuts," Garrus said, although he couldn't prevent a smile. "Nothing's ever easy, Weaver."

"The man speaks the truth!" Weaver said, throwing out his arms. "Praise the Lord!"

Garrus punched him on the shoulder. "Yeah, yeah. Now, let's see who else is left on this ship. I think it's ours now."

"Certainly seems bigger than the last one," Weaver said, looking around. "It has corridors! Honest-to-God corridors!"

The sound of doors opening made them both turn back towards the corner leading to the airlock. A familiar rapid pounding started up, stopping barely a second later when Melenis skidded around the corner, limbs fully extended.

"Calm it down," Garrus said. "We're done here."

Melenis looked past him at the body, then relaxed, shrinking down with a series of clanks and whirs until he looked like a volus again. "Very well. I went ahead of the others. We are all uninjured."

"Damn, we're good," Weaver said. "Not a scratch on any of us, and twenty or so of them dead."

"Couldn't have done it without you, big man," Garrus said to Melenis.

Melenis inclined his head. "Debatable, but I will accept the compliment."

"The others are following?"

"Yes."

"Good," Garrus said, and holstered the smuggled pistol that had killed Williams. "Now, let's have a look at our new ship."


	34. An Eye For An Eye: Epilogue

**AN EYE FOR AN EYE**

**EPILOGUE**

"I still can't believe you shot me," Garrus said.

Erash threw up his hands. "Look, I said I was sorry. How was I supposed to know it was you?"

"No, you didn't let me finish. I can't believe you shot me in the head with a rifle and didn't kill me."

"You're a hard man to work for, Vakarian," Erash muttered. "OK, look. The next time I shoot you in the head, I'll try my damnedest to make sure I kill you. Deal?"

"I'll hold you to that."

They were lounging on the sofas in the lobby of the base they'd pried from the Shadows' hands, still in the process of renovation. There were still bullet holes and damage from various fires and explosions all over the place, but most of the furniture had been replaced.

"If it's any consolation, I'd have killed you," Weaver called from the kitchen table. "Bam! Dead."

"You'd been shot in the shoulder, like, two days before," Erash shot back. "You'd be terrible with a rifle. Spray and pray is all you're good for."

"Suppressing fire is a valuable tool in battle."

"Whatever helps you feel good about shooting at nothing."

Garrus watched Weaver drop a hand to his plate, select an apple core and take aim. A second later, it struck Erash clean in the temple. _And that was the arm he'd been shot in, as well. Maybe he's secretly a krogan._

"Fuck!"

"Boom," Weaver said smugly. "Headshot."

"Oh, it's _on_," Erash hissed, and grabbed the core to return fire. Halfway across the room, his throw – which Garrus's visor told him was wildly inaccurate – was intercepted by a glowing blue aura, and the core came to a stop to float a couple of metres above the ground.

"Idiocy," Monteague said. Garrus looked up to see him watching over the ground level from the balcony above. "Foolishness. Childishness."

"Ooh, I know this one," Butler said, coming up to stand beside him. "Is it 'necessary qualities to even think about joining Archangel'?"

"Sadly, I think you may be right," Monteague said. He brought the apple core up to his level, then sent it flying over his shoulder with a flick of his wrist. "Then again, we chose to live on Omega."

"You don't have to be crazy to work here-" Garrus began.

"But it helps," Weaver finished. "Save it. We all know we're nutters."

"Which means that when compared to each other, we look downright sane," Butler said. "That's how it works, right?"

Erash shrugged. "Could be worse."

"It will be," Monteague said.

"How d'you figure that?"

"Well," Monteague said, in the manner of somebody beginning a long, long speech, "our little escapade last week achieved several things."

"Williams is dead," Weaver offered.

"True. That means there's a large opening for any up-and-coming gun runners."

"But for now, we've shut down the weapons coming into the station," Garrus said. "That's worth at least a couple of weeks of relative peace."

"Also true," Monteague said. "That's because every outfit on Omega had an expensive stake in that shipment, which, as you might recall, we destroyed."

"That hurt to see," Weaver said wistfully. "Tens of millions, gone in a flash. Although we did get that ship out of it."

The _Hailfire_ had only had three people on it when they'd boarded it, and one of those had been Williams. Another had been an engineer who'd rather foolishly attempted to shoot Melenis when he'd gone down there to check the place, and the third – the pilot – had outright thanked them for killing Williams and had happily offered up all the ship's hardcodes in exchange for walking away with a brain in his head. Their old ship had been shunted out of the way by the _Hailfire_, damaging it only slightly but making retrieving it hard enough to leave destroying it along with the _Starfucker_ as the only real option. _And at this rate, we'll be sitting in the Destiny Ascension in three months' time._

"It may have hurt to see for you-"

"Ooh, listen to that contempt," Weaver said, cupping a hand to his ear. "That cuts deep, Luc."

"_But_," Monteague said pointedly, "we didn't lose money, because we had no stake there in the first place. Williams' accounts were on the ship's computer. Essentially, we've cost everybody important on the station a great deal of money. The Blue Suns, two million. The Blood Pack, two and a half. Eclipse, five. Even Aria lost a million's worth there. And because Williams took 50% up front, the actual orders were twice that. His accounts are based on Illium, so that money's not coming back – and with Williams dead, who is there to blame?"

"The November criminals," Butler suggested.

"Us," Monteague said, with a shrug.

"Hell of a way to make an impact," Garrus said. He brought up his omnitool and went to one of his extranet bookmarks. "Look at this."

The 'tool projected a simple graph, about a metre square. The line began on one side at nearly the lowest possible point and continued there for about two thirds of the way, then began to pick up increasingly quickly until it was about 40% of the way up the _y _axis. Then, it went exponential, shooting almost straight upwards at the very tail end of the graph.

"Al-Jilani's viewing figures whenever somebody punches her," Weaver said, through a mouthful of sandwich.

"Close, but... also not very close."

"Ah," Erash said, sitting forward. "Search volume for 'Archangel' on Omega."

"Exactly," Garrus said. "We're not exactly underground any more. If we went public, we'd be celebrities."

"And dead," Monteague said.

"That too."

"If you shoot for the moon, sometimes the moon shoots back," Butler said.

Weaver snorted. "What the hell kind of moon are you talking about? Or was that just a Star Wars reference?"

"I never actually saw Star Wars."

"I hope you didn't just say what I thought you said."

"It's two hundred years old!"

"Not even the prequel trilogy?"

"No."

"The sequel trilogy?"

"No."

"The shitty remakes?"

"No!"

"Right, that's it," Weaver said calmly. "Luc, have you seen Star Wars?"

Monteague looked vaguely affronted at the notion. "Of course not."

Weaver turned his gaze on the rest of them. "And none of you lot have?"

He got back a chorus of murmured dissent. _I think Joker told me I had to watch it once. Never did._

"You fucking people," Weaver muttered. "We're watching the originals tonight, you hear me? This is non-negotiable."

Garrus reached down and shut off the projection of the graph.

"Hey, bring that back," Erash said. "I liked that."

"You liked that we've made ourselves the biggest enemy of everyone of importance on Omega?" Monteague said, raising an eyebrow.

"No, I liked being objectively popular."

"Two sides of the same coin," Garrus said. "Being well-known makes us an icon as well as a target."

"Bring it on," Erash said, waving a dismissive hand. "After all, what's the worst that could happen?"


	35. A Tooth For A Tooth: Outlasted

**MASS EFFECT: INTERREGNUM**

* * *

**A TOOTH FOR A TOOTH**

**ONE: OUTLASTED**

* * *

Nalah had waited up for him. She always did. She'd always told Butler that she couldn't sleep without him by her side, which never failed to bring a smile to his face. He knew that wasn't the whole story, but he accepted the white lie all the same. _I've told worse to her._

She didn't know that, though, and her smile was radiant. As he kissed her, he wondered how much of it was relief that he'd lived through another night without a bullet to the skull. At first, she'd tried to persuade him to work the comm lines from home, but he insisted on being out there with Garrus and the rest when they were at work. He told her it was because an extra pair of eyes on some rooftop could be the difference between life and death, and it was true, to some extent. What he hadn't said was that running comms from their apartment would make it a prime target if his codes were ever somehow broken. Sometimes, it seemed like his wife could read his mind. He hoped she couldn't read that far.

"God, Mike," she said, still leaning into him. He pulled her closer, pressed her dark hair against his face, breathed in her smell. "You said it would be over by ten."

"I may have said that," he murmured.

"And what time is it now?"

"Two."

"How did that happen?"

He smiled. "Well, there was a lot happening... bullets flying, blood pouring- ow!"

She was about five inches shorter than him and built slimly, but a punch in the arm from her hurt even through light armour. "Mike!"

He raised his hands in mock surrender. "I'm sorry. But Omega's a better place for tonight. We made sure of that."

Nalah's smile was still there, but softer, with the delight faded around the edges. "I don't doubt it. I just worry about you."

"It's bigger than me," Butler said. "You know that."

"Nothing's bigger than you, Mike," Nalah said, and kissed him again. It was about an hour before they came apart this time, leaving a trail of discarded clothes and pieces of armour behind them as they staggered towards their bedroom.

Butler was still lying awake an hour after that, staring at the ceiling. They'd installed an old ceiling fan there, painfully out of date compared to modern air-con but pleasant to look at all the same. It span slowly, too slowly to be of any practical use, but he enjoyed looking up at it when he lay in bed. It had been a holdover from their old apartment in Chicago, back on Earth: antiquated but homely. Chicago and Omega were similar in a lot of ways, he thought, especially these days: huge metal cities full of pollution and darkness, corruption and death. Omega was to the Citadel what Chicago was to the big, shining sci-fi cities like Boston and SeaVan. _Not quite as similar as we thought when we moved here, though. Chicago's been decaying for a century, but Omega was never good enough to start decaying._

His thoughts drifted back to the night's work. It had been meticulously planned, but plans laid by the Archangel were often subject to unscheduled alterations. It had been a good plan at one point, but that point was too long ago and had been passed too fast to remember exactly what it had looked like. _It would have been fine if Sidonis had been right that there was only one Blue Suns task force. Then again, a whole lot of things would be fine if Sidonis were right more often._ The turian irritated Butler, although Nalah seemed to enjoy toying with him whenever she got the chance. The kid was half-terrified of her now, and he and Butler very rarely spoke if the job didn't require it.

The first part of the plan had actually worked perfectly. Butler had watched from the rooftops as Sidonis, Erash and Sensat had lured the Suns in. The whole Ragan district was on edge after the last month; Williams was dead and his cargo lost, which had caused chaos enough among the merc groups vying for control of the station, but Garrus had chosen to push ahead with major strikes against the Blue Suns in the districts their grip on was tenuous. It had been as simple as Erash shouting _'Archangel!'_ as the first bullets started to fly, and then the three of them had been running for their lives as twenty angry Suns followed them like a swarm of heavily-armoured bees.

Butler had relayed their positions and their situation back to the rest of the team, and then it had been a matter of sitting back and watching the show. They'd been chased down an alley – _it's always an alley, almost as if this station doesn't have any actual streets –_ at which point the mercs had begun to die. Garrus was sniping merrily away from another rooftop, while Weaver and Melenis had caught them in a bloody crossfire. The mercs had been cut down to a man within ten seconds. Some had tried to run, but a jerk from Monteague's biotics around their ankles had put a stop to that, and one lucky human must have thought he was going to get out of there alive until Erash had triggered one of his signature nail-bombs as he ran past it. It had been simple and clinical, and Butler had been quietly impressed.

Then the next twenty had shown up, and the next, and they knew what they were up against. Butler had followed the battle all over Ragan, hopping rooftops and reporting the positions of the Suns. It had ended well enough; minor wounds to Sensat and Garrus had been the worst of it, and the dead Suns numbered well over fifty by the time the last shots were fired. There had been moments, though... he knew well enough that he'd saved them from ambushes and flanking manoeuvres at least twice. He was proud of that, though he'd kept it to himself. _And maybe it's nothing to be proud of. Saving lives by facilitating the end of others. What's to be proud of there?_

He didn't like bloodshed. He'd made no secret of that, and they'd never asked him to kill. He wouldn't even if they did. _Hypocrisy. I don't kill people, but they do, and I help them do it. _Every way he ran it through his head, he could rationally see that he was still a killer. His heart told him that all that mattered was who pulled the trigger, not who identified the targets. _And that went down well at Nuremberg, didn't it? __**He**__ was just following orders, __**he**__ was just giving them, and nobody takes any responsibility..._

The fan span slowly above his head, making a tiny whir. He stared at it a little while longer, then turned over and came face to face with Nalah. Her eyes were closed, but there was a slight fluttering under the delicate lashes. A frown had formed on her face. _Bad dreams. I wonder if I feature?_ He reached an arm over and gently pulled her in closer, but the frown almost seemed to deepen, tiny wrinkles etching themselves around the corners of her mouth like miniature scars.

He sighed, rolled away and closed his eyes. Another hour passed, and sleep still didn't come. He was about to give up on getting any when the implant behind his ear began to rumble and buzz.

_Again?_

He twitched the covers back and eased out of bed, leaving Nalah sleeping peacefully. Whatever dream it had been seemed to be over. He padded through the open bedroom door and made his way to the kitchen table through the dark to take the call.

"Butler," Garrus said into the inside of his ear. "I need a little expertise here."

Butler yawned. "Couldn't wait until morning, huh?"

"Morning? What time is it?"

"Oh-five on the standard cycle."

"Ah," Garrus said sheepishly. "Sorry. Did I wake you?"

"No. What's up?"

"Another signal going out to Archangel. I know, nothing unusual about that."

That was certainly true, Butler reflected. The idea of Archangel had spread across Omega like wildfire. Some combination of the name, the imagery, the years of oppression and the simple fact that anyone who went into a firefight with them tended to come out of it with a nasty case of dead had been the fuel for the flames, and now the extranet was straining under the weight of thousands of messages offering support, praise or poorly-spelled threats. They usually ignored them, but nevertheless they'd set up an Archangel email address to field the morass of missives behind a mountain of firewalls and proxies and encryptions. Butler never bothered to check it. Apparently, Garrus did.

"So what's different?" Butler asked.

"Take a look."

He picked up a PDA from the table as it softly vibrated, heralding a new message, and opened the video file attached to it.

It showed a warehouse, the high, fixed angle and relatively low resolution of the image telling him that it most likely came from a security camera. It showed a group of turians, humans and batarians standing around or sitting on crates, apparently chatting idly. Their Blue Suns insignias and tattoos were plain to see.

Butler frowned. _Who'd send us this?_

He was about to ask Garrus if this was all they'd received when a streak of blue energy rippled in from out of shot, hit a batarian in the chest and blossomed into a howling biotic vortex. It grew to almost three metres in diameter, and suddenly the Blue Suns were being sucked in. Butler watched in fascination and horror in equal mix as they were ripped to shreds, armour and all. Severed limbs and great splashes of various species' blood began to emerge, hurled for metres on end to paint the entire surrounding area a sickening spectrum of brown, red and blue.

The vortex petered out and disappeared, leaving a horrific mess of gore to splash down onto the floor. The Suns hadn't just been killed. They'd been utterly annihilated.

Butler swallowed. He managed not to vomit, but the acid taste of it still burned up his throat. "Jesus Christ, Garrus. What the hell was that?"

"Watch," Garrus said.

As Butler turned his attention back to the video, another turian walked out into the middle of the wreckage from the direction the warp had come from. He turned, and looked straight at the camera. He clearly wasn't a Blue Sun; his armour was dark and sleek and looked like it had cost as much as all of the dead Suns' put together. The resolution wasn't great, but Butler could still see that his face was devoid of the usual turian tattoos.

"_Archangel,"_ he said. _"This is what I can offer you."_

"Another applicant?" Butler said sceptically. "Impressive, sure, but that could be faked easily." _Impressive, I say. Now there's an understatement._

"It's real," Garrus said. "Trust me on that. Or Sensat, rather."

Butler sat back, rubbed his chin. "So you want to recruit this guy?"

"There's more," Garrus said. _Sure, dodge the question._ Butler looked back to the screen again, and the bottom dropped out of his stomach as saw his own face. It was at the centre of a set of crosshairs.

_Oh, man. Nalah's going to be pissed if she sees this._

He looked closer, watched his own mouth move, and realised that this was footage from just hours ago. The man behind the sights must have been on a nearby rooftop, watching him. The skin on the nape of Butler's neck began to crawl. _Well, that's another few grey hairs, I'll bet._

The image froze, with the crosshairs perfectly centred on Butler's forehead.

"_I could have made the shot and nobody would have known,"_ the turian's voice spoke again. The video cycled through a quick selection of images: crosshairs over Garrus as he sniped down at the street, over Weaver, over Sensat, over Erash._"I could have killed any of you. I didn't. I don't want you dead. I want to join you. You've seen what I can do, Archangel. I am not threatening you: if you reject me, then I will not try to harm your cause."_

The message ended with a series of contact details. Butler cast an expert's eye over them; all of them were run through servers or sites that offered high security for your messages, likely highly encrypted.

"Very professional," he said aloud.

"Indeed."

Butler rubbed the back of his neck, still shaken by the image of his head in the crosshairs. _One twitch of the finger, and Nalah's a widow... _"I haven't seen any turian biotics before."

"They're rare," Garrus said, "but more than that, the Hierarchy does everything it can to keep them in service, especially in special groups and black ops. It knows how valuable a biotic is."

"Which means this guy isn't valuable?"

Garrus snorted. "You saw what he did. Looked pretty valuable to me."

"So you do want to recruit him."

"I want to talk to him. He deserves that much."

"Why?"

"He didn't kill us when he had the chance."

Butler laughed aloud. "That's what gets your attention?"

"Doesn't it get yours?"

Butler had no answer to that. "So you think he's genuine?"

"The footage is real. He's given us a damn good reason to trust him, or at least to believe he doesn't want us dead." A dark note of playfulness crept into the turian's tone. "Frankly, he made a better job of approaching us than you did."

"At least I didn't point a gun at your head."

"Maybe you should have," Garrus said. He didn't sound like he was joking any more. "Like I said: it gets my attention. In any case, I need you to get in contact with this guy securely. We'll arrange a meeting..."

They talked for a quarter of an hour or so on details. Butler didn't fail to notice exactly how careful Garrus was getting. _He'd be an idiot if he weren't. We're going after the most powerful merc organisation in the galaxy. It's not hard to believe they would hire a guy like this to find us... and he's proven well enough that he could kill us._

That image of his own taut face at the centre of the crosshairs seemed like it was burned right onto his retinas. He couldn't shake it from his mind... and when he could, it was replaced by Nalah. Alone.

He shivered, and went back to bed. Nalah murmured something as he eased back under the covers, but he managed not to wake her. He lay there, one arm draped over her, and waited for the sleep that wouldn't come. His mind wouldn't let go of a fistful of images: a brown slurry of blood and viscera pooling in the alley where four dozen Suns lay dead and dying, a biotic tornado of bodies and gore, those crosshairs hovering over his head... _they call it Omega, and with good reason. There's nothing but death here._

* * *

Ripper came alone and unarmed. Neither was difficult.

A volus had met him in a bar at the arranged time, and he'd followed it to the rendezvous. It did not take long to see through the disguise: even for a volus, there was a stiffness of movement and an odd manner. It was the same thing he had seen last night, except then it had been seven feet tall and four wide.

It interested him a little; cyborgs were so rare in such a complete and obviously military conversion. From the little he knew about the quirks and intricacies of volus physiology, regrowing limbs was almost impossible for them, so he supposed they would be good candidates for the procedure in theoretical terms. In reality, volus rarely packed anything with higher firepower than a credit chit. It raised some intriguing questions: the kind of technology he was witnessing was restricted to the highest military echelons, yet here it was on a civilian. Was Archangel funded by a government? It would make sense as part of a plot to further destabilise the Terminus Systems. It would be an interesting irony if he had left the Hierarchy only to join a group funded by them.

He and the volus exchanged only a few words, identifying themselves. The rest of the journey passed in silence. He hadn't been physically checked or even obviously scanned, but Ripper knew that the volus had ascertained that he was unarmed somehow. His own computers were high-quality: he'd returned all the Hierarchy equipment when he'd left, but nine years of accumulating pay he hadn't found time or reason to spend had left him more than enough for top-of-the-line replacements. They hadn't detected a thing.

He wondered if the volus might be Archangel himself. There were few more effective disguises than the volus's fat little body, after all, and he had seen him in action. Certainly it was a possibility, although he personally believed that Archangel was one of the humans: not the large bearded one, who had all the hallmarks of being there for heavy firepower alone, but perhaps the bald biotic or the rooftop coordinator. The team he'd observed had moved well together, with definite military precision – civilian spectators might have thought they were simply moving and firing at random, but Ripper recognised strong tactical fluidity when he saw it. It reminded him of V-33, in an odd way. _If they are not military, then they are well-trained and well-commanded._

The volus took him a long way through side streets and alleys, at one point cutting through a crowded plaza and a private mall. The intent was clear: confusing any tails. _Good practice._ It was about ten minutes before they reached their destination: an old, decrepit apartment building on the edge of Gozu. They climbed the stairs inside in silence and darkness, the only light coming from the flashlight on Ripper's omnitool. The volus apparently had some other means of seeing.

The roof was a good choice, he decided. As they emerged, he looked around, catching sight of at least ten good sniper positions. He had no doubt that several were occupied.

Ahead of him stood another male turian, blue in tattoos and in armour. An Armax Needle was slung over his shoulder, and a military-grade visor extended down in front of one eye.

"Stop," the turian said. "Take out your amp."

Ripper nodded, and reached to the back of his neck. The expensive amp hissed out, sending indescribable shivers racing down his spine, and he handed it to the volus. The volus took it, then stepped back and seemed to melt into the shadows, leaving Ripper alone with the man. Cold blue eyes regarded him, sizing him up, judging the threat level. Soldier's eyes, Ripper knew. He could see the distrust in them. _Good. I should not be trusted._

"Your little introduction was very impressive," the turian said evenly. "I particularly liked the part where you didn't shoot me in the head."

Ripper inclined his head, painfully aware of the cool hole in his neck where his amp usually sat. "You are Archangel, correct?"

"Essentially, yes," Archangel said. "And you are?"

"Ripper," Ripper said.

"Appropriate. Real name?"

"Ripper."

Archangel smiled thinly. "_Birth_ name, then."

"Are you aware of how cabals function, Archangel?" Ripper asked.

"They're where biotics are usually assigned," Archangel said, showing no signs of irritation at the apparent switch in topic. _Perhaps he suspects._ "Past that, my knowledge is second-hand-anecdotal. I never worked with any."

"There are hundreds in operation, and many of them have a great deal more operational freedom than is conventional for Hierarchy assets," Ripper said. It was almost a direct quote from the primer he'd read a decade ago. "It's a relatively common practice among some of the highest-level cabals to request significant sacrifices of potential members."

"Sacrifices," Archangel said. It wasn't a question, but it was still inviting him to go on.

Ripper nodded. "I joined one known as V-33. They requested that my tattoos be removed, that I break all ties with my former life and family, and that I surrender my birth name in favour of a new one. Ripper."

"Hell," Archangel breathed. Ripper looked uncomprehendingly at him for a second, then remembered. It was only ten years since he'd joined V-33, but it felt like a lifetime. In a very real way, it was. When the choice had been put to him he'd been as surprised as Archangel looked now, but once he'd washed away his past, it barely seemed to matter any more. Every member of V-33 had said the same. To the turians they'd been before, the sacrifice was immense. To the turians they'd become, it was irrelevant.

"...what made you do it?" Archangel said, after a couple of seconds. "No, don't answer that. It's always duty."

Ripper clicked his fingers, drawing a pale blue biotic flicker in the air in front of him. His fingers glimmered in the dim glow. "I have a powerful gift. It was my duty to use it well."

Archangel seemed to relax slightly. "Good answer."

Ripper knew why. He had phrased it as accurately as possible: _use it well._ Not _use it for the good of the Hierarchy_ or _make the most of it_, but _use it well._ Now that he knew Archangel was a turian, he could construct a basic psychological profile. _Motivated by a sense of duty, but not to governments __or races – to doing what he thinks is right. This is not a sanctioned operation. He's truly independent._

"It begs the question, though," Archangel went on. "You left V-33, but you're still using the name they gave you."

"I didn't leave V-33," Ripper said. "They left me." He paused a moment, forcing back a deep, dark tide of emotion. He tended to think of his mind as a bright glass room at the bottom of a lightless sea, clean and clinical inside but surrounded by an ocean that threatened to swamp it. It had helped in the early months, when he'd still been thinking of himself by his birth name: he'd isolated the core of his being away from the polluting influences of family and egoism, and he'd lowered himself into that dark sea. It had remained undisturbed for years. These days, it was getting harder. There were cracks and leaks and dimming lights, and ten years' worth of repression was a heavy burden to bear.

He went on. He would keep no secrets. He'd never liked the selfish feeling of knowing something nobody else did. "Every mission was high-risk, and we saw fatalities on a lot of them, but there was always new blood coming in. There were a constant 33 members, as the name suggests. Eighteen biotics and fifteen naturals, usually. The naturals had the highest turnover. All but four of those present when I joined died over the years, but there were still ten biotic survivors. I knew them for ten years. Then they were all killed."

Archangel grimaced. "I'm sorry."

"Thirty-one died on Thekal," Ripper said. He had given evidence about it at the inquest, which made it easier. He just kept his voice absolutely level and refused to think about anything else. He was just saying words, after all. _Words, collections of moving air molecules. They can't hurt you... but when you look at like that, everything is simply moving molecules. Words. People. Bullets._ "It was a hub for a major batarian-krogan slaving operation. We destroyed each other, in the end. They set off tactical nuclear charges when they saw that we would take the base."

"You survived that?"

"Yes," Ripper said. "The charges were weak, relatively. Our support crew pulled me and three others out of the ruins. They all died within a day. I survived. With cuts and bruises."

The words left a bitter, bitter taste in his mouth.

"I'm sorry," Archangel said again.

"They offered me a position as head of a reconstituted V-33," Ripper said. "I turned it down. My commission was over; I had no more debt to the Hierarchy. I was done with them." He left the rest unsaid, but he knew Archangel would understand it. _It leaves you living in fear. You can take the position and go through the whole cycle again and watch your friends die around you and feel every death like a hammer to the heart... or you can cut yourself off from them emotionally, stop seeing them as friends. The former leaves you broken. The latter leaves you empty. I wonder what the psychologists would have made of me?_

That had been the crux of it, although he wasn't sure if that had been his reasoning at the time or just an ad hoc rationalisation for a moment of weakness. He preferred to think it was a well-reasoned choice, but he could see the emotional strain building as he sat inside his glass box and watched the cracks spread under the water's oppressive blackness. He didn't feel it; that was the point, that was why he'd built himself his little mental sanctuary, but it gave him too good a view. He sat there in calm serenity and listened to the quiet, thin sound of his mind beginning to splinter, pushed to breaking point by a decade of compressed, repressed emotion.

Archangel was still watching him with oddly intense eyes. "And so you came to Omega."

"I came where every soldier without a war washes up."

"There's something about Omega, isn't there?" Archangel's tone echoed Ripper's own bitterness, edged with mordant humour. "The drain at the bottom of the galaxy."

"This place's spirit is poison," Ripper said. "It's too strong for most people. It kills them, whether physically or mentally. But you... you're an exception, a beacon. An icon. A purpose."

Archangel nodded. _He does understand. _"And purpose is what you lack."

"I gave up one life for another, and then I lost it. I spent both in service. To be without that is... almost overwhelming," Ripper said truthfully. Unbidden images of impossibly huge oceans of water lapped at the fringes of his mind.

"I disagree," Archangel said. "The purpose is always the same: doing what's right. Never let anything get in the way of that. Governments and laws can go hang if they try."

Despite everything, Ripper smiled at the sheer force of the conviction in Archangel's voice. _I wonder how genuine it is?_ "It's good to hear that. I had been worrying that you were a puppet of some government."

Archangel smiled back, though it was little more than a slight twitch at the corners of his mouth. "I think you'll find my organisation is a little less professional than you might be expecting."

"I'll manage," Ripper said. _I don't know anything else, but I'll manage._

"I don't doubt it," Archangel said. He walked over to Ripper and extended a hand. Ripper looked blankly at it for a second, then remembered and shook it. _Fifteen years since I last did that._ "Welcome aboard."

Ripper nodded. "Thank you, sir."

Archangel smiled his thin half-smile again. "There's no need for that. Call me Garrus."

"Yes, sir," Ripper said instinctively.

"It's a big step. Feel free to work up to it. Until then, we have two rules. One: no innocents get hurt. Two: we split the money-"

"Money is not a concern for me, sir," Ripper said.

"Word of advice: don't let the rest of them hear you say that. And it's just 'Garrus'."

"Yes, sir."

"Great, another smartass," Archangel said, sounding resigned. "I should be running a comedy club."

"There's one condition I have, sir," Ripper said.

"Which is?"

"The slaving ring which killed V-33 is still operational across the galaxy. It has a presence on Omega, one I spent several months hunting down without success. About a week ago, I came into some new information about it."

"Funny the way information seems to fall out of the sky on Omega," Archangel said. "Don't you agree?"

Ripper thought back to the batarian who had given him the intel. The thick, coppery smell of his arterial blood was vivid in his memory, and the screams were etched deeper still.

"Yes, sir," he said. "I think we can get them."

There was a moment of silence before Archangel – _I can't think of him as 'Garrus', why is that? _- responded. "Is this a non-negotiable condition, Ripper?"

"It's... personal," Ripper said, aware that he hadn't answered the question. Or perhaps he had.

"Personal is bad," Archangel said. "I prefer objective."

"There are about three hundred slaves shipped out of here every week," Ripper said. "Twice that remain here. This ring specialises in sexual slavery. Most of those processed are women and children. It may be personal for me, sir, but if there's anybody who deserves death, it's these slavers."

"Even so, we're not in the revenge business."

"V-33's killers died with us. This isn't revenge. It's just personal."

Archangel examined him briefly, his eyes as cold as ever, then nodded. "Agreed. If we can, we'll kill the bastards."

Ripper bowed slightly. "Thank you, sir."

"Garrus," Archangel said wearily. "Please. You may have given up your name, but I'd rather like to keep mine." He gestured into the shadows, and the volus seemingly appeared out of nowhere to return Ripper's amp. He slotted it back into place with a shiver, then relaxed as the warm heat of his full biotic power coursed through his body again. "You've met Melenis here, but I should explain-"

"He's cybernetically enhanced," Ripper said. "I know."

"Oh," Archangel said. "Good. Because, you know, we've had some bad experiences with people finding that out the hard way."

"I hit him very hard," Melenis explained to Ripper.

"I can imagine," Ripper said. "Why?"

"It's a long, stupidly complicated story," Archangel said. "And also one which we probably shouldn't talk about, for a variety of reasons. Come on. We'll meet the rest of the team."

He turned and headed towards the way down from the roof, his rifle slapping against his armour. Ripper watched his retreating back with interest. _He gives me my amp back and turns his back on me. I could kill him so easily... but he knows that. That's the point. _

_Trust like that might come back to bite you._


	36. A Tooth For A Tooth: Outgunned

**A TOOTH FOR A TOOTH**

**TWO: OUTGUNNED**

* * *

Butler was intrigued by Ripper, not least because he'd never met a turian biotic before. The lack of tattoos on his red-brown skin was unusual as well, but he hadn't quite understood the significance of them until Sidonis had called Ripper a _fucking bareface_ and accused him of being a traitor inserted by one of their enemies. It had taken a few minutes for Garrus to calm things down, ending with Sidonis sitting in simmering silence. Ripper had barely reacted. He reminded Butler of Melenis: both of them had an eerie sense of detachment to them, as if they were looking at the world from behind a window rather than actually living in it. Melenis was, in a way, but Ripper had no such excuse. He was sitting just across from Butler, but he somehow seemed a lot further away. _And he's the man who put my head in his crosshairs._

To his credit, Ripper had apologised for that, though he'd maintained that it had been necessary to prove he wasn't there to kill them. Sidonis had objected again, but a harsh put-down from Garrus had shut him up. He was still sitting slouched in his chair to Butler's left, glowering across the table at Ripper.

_He annoys Garrus, won't speak to Erash, barely interacts with me, Sensat, Melenis and Luc, and now he's carved out a new feud for himself... I don't think Weaver particularly likes him either. Not a man of many friends, Sidonis._

One of the few times Butler had seen Ripper display even a hint of emotion was when he'd first laid eyes on the kitchen table which pulled double shifts as their conference table. That had been a surprise. Butler remembered walking into the base for the first time and being taken aback by the total lack of military intensity about the place, but he'd had the intercepted communications to tell him that Archangel wasn't exactly professional. Ripper had had no such warning, and he looked comically out of place in his sleek black armour against the backdrop of a sink piled with dirty dishes. He wasn't the only one in armour, but it stood out nevertheless – Garrus looked a lot more casual in his worn blue plate than he ever did in civilian clothes, and Weaver had been known to sleep in his.

Ripper's story was fascinating, although he limited it to a few brief sentences. He seemed uncomfortable with exposing his past like that, and that past itself told Butler why. He tried to imagine cutting off contact with everyone and everything he had known and found that he couldn't. From what he knew about turian ideals, it seemed to him that Ripper was unusually dedicated to the selflessness they were infamous for. He wondered if there was some analogue among human special forces. The idea of completely giving up an identity was alien to him, but he wasn't a soldier. Looking around the table, it struck him just how many of his colleagues seemed to have cut themselves off from their pasts. Melenis refused to discuss his, Sensat apparently thought his was a dangerous secret, Erash didn't seem to care enough to elaborate, Monteague had been evasive and vague... _and how much of my own have I told them about? Pretty much nothing. Born in Russia, raised in Chicago, now living here, and that's the most that they know. Most of them have probably forgotten my first name, if they ever knew it in the first place._

The more he thought about it, the less of an anomaly Ripper seemed.

Soon enough, they turned to what passed for business in the house of Archangel. Butler wasn't surprised; it had been fairly obvious that something more important than introductions was in the works, and when Ripper began explaining it, it all sounded rather familiar.

Ripper called up a relatively up-to-date map of Omega on his omnitool and projected it into the air above the centre of the table. It had taken Butler about a year to learn to read an Omega map even half as well as he could have done with any city on Earth; he could have seen an unlabelled grid of Chicago's streets and read it easily, but Omega worked in three dimensions. In some places, there were three or even four different networks of streets stacked vertically on top of each other, and sometimes they'd criss-cross and change level without warning. It hadn't so much been built as it had slowly congealed, leaving bizarre district shapes and streets that wound and curled all over the place.

He used the central irregular helix shape of the Core Road which ran most of the way down the station, going from the semi-affluent areas at the 'top' through the slums and abandoned areas all the way down to the warehouse and industrial areas, to orient himself, then looked through the wild orange webbing of the projection to the area highlighted in blue. It was near the edge of the warehouse districts, bordering the outer reaches of the crowded slums in one of the lowest districts. _How familiar._

"My information indicates that this is the single largest slaving hub on Omega," Ripper said, in a smooth, deep voice. "It's more likely than not a part of the ring formerly based on Thekal, which was the largest based outside of Hegemonic space." Ripper didn't look at Sensat as he said it, Butler noted. Monteague did. "I wasn't able to get any detailed information past that a krogan named Kron is heading the operation. However, I'm confident that the lead is sound."

"Just to clarify," Weaver said, "is this a shady-meeting-in-dark-alleyway or an oh-God-please-don't-kill-me kind of source?"

"The latter," Ripper said. "Almost word for word, in fact."

Weaver made a point of stroking his beard thoughtfully. "Interesting."

Ripper magnified the area, focusing in on a complex of four large warehouses. "There are two ships in use by the ring, both of which look like old Valar 86 models; little more than merchant cruisers, although slavers usually augment them with considerable firepower. Do we have a ship available, sir?"

"...yes," Garrus said, after a second. Nobody had missed the 'sir', but for the moment nobody said anything. "The _Hailfire_, a customised Yane-Hesulin _Cavalcade-_class. Third-hand prototype CBT from a Union frigate, though we're not sure if it'll actually work as anything more than a regular array under fire, and we think the GARDIAN systems look pretty good for a ship that size."

"Has it not seen combat?" Ripper asked, though his mask slipped a little to reveal slight incredulity. _Going from his V-33 to us... talk about culture shock._

"Oh, definitely," Garrus said. "Just not with us in it."

"I see," Ripper said, with a tiny edge of uncertainty in his voice. "Who is the pilot?"

"That'd be me," Sidonis said. It was hard not to mentally insert the word 'bareface' at the end of the sentence. "Not that I have a licence."

Butler fought back a smile at the obvious strain keeping up his professionalism put on Ripper. The turian was almost looking plaintive now, and Butler found himself wondering if that composure would ever crack completely. It would be interesting to find out if there was still an actual person underneath all the layers of military conditioning.

"In that case," Ripper said eventually, "I suggest a ground assault, with the _Hailfire _kept standing by to pick us up if the slavers manage to get their ships away. The _Cavalcade-_class is about 6.4 on the Minarax scale compared to barely 3 for the 86, so it should be simple to disable them before they escape through the relay." He looked to Garrus for approval.

Garrus nodded slowly. "We have plenty of margin for error with the speed of those 86ers, which means we can afford to be careful on the ground." He looked around the table, apparently making sure that they were all listening closely. "We do not let innocents become collateral damage. Our primary goal is minimising the number of prisoners killed when we go in. Eliminating the slavers themselves comes second to that. Understood?"

Butler joined in the murmurs of assent (and one crisp 'Yessir' from Ripper) going around the table.

Garrus winced. "Just 'Garrus'. Please."

"Yess-" Ripper started, then caught himself and tried nodding instead, getting a quiet ripple of laughter.

"Right," Garrus said loudly, silencing the rest of them. "Sidonis, you'll be stationed on the _Hailfire_. Keep it in the spaceport until we call you. It looks to me like some of those warehouses serve as hangars for their ships, so it shouldn't be a problem for you to land and pick us up if they get away."

Sidonis folded his arms and leaned back on his chair. "Can't I just shoot them down?"

"A lot of 86 models are outfitted so that slaves don't have to be disembarked," Ripper said. "They're kept aboard, often in communal holds, while the ships go from system to system and slowly fill up at various bases. There are almost certainly going to be slaves still aboard."

"Plus you'd cause massive collateral damage if they crashed or lost reactor integrity," Garrus said. "And don't try to take out their engines without us on board. We'd need dedicated gunners for that kind of accuracy."

"Got it," Sidonis said sourly. "No fun whatsoever."

"You also don't get shot at," Erash said. "Which, given the usual way we do things, is pretty damn likely to happen to the rest of us. Right, _sir_?"

The corners of Garrus's mouth twitched at the acidity of the last word. "Right," he said. "We'll call it 1800 tonight, meeting here to take aircars over. Ripper, how many are we looking at?"

"Minimum fifteen, maximum forty, sir. Likely towards the higher end."

This time, Garrus ignored the 'sir'. "Then we're going to need heavy offensive firepower. Weaver, Melenis, Ripper, you're our shock troops. We'll enter here." He lit up one of the doors of the nearest warehouse to the residential districts, which faced out onto a wide street, with the tip of his finger, turning it blue. "I'd like to have more entry points, but it looks like that's all we have. That means we need stealth, so Sensat, Butler, you have to find out what sensors and so on they have up and make sure they can't see us."

Butler nodded, already mentally making notes. _With no law enforcement (or law, in fact), they won't __be too careful... but it seems like the base is being kept at least somewhat secret, from what Ripper said. Probably some cameras... we can fool those... could be some proximity stuff, but that's less likely..._

Garrus had already moved on. "Erash and Luc, you're with me. We're there to sow chaos while the big guns rip them apart. I can snipe. Erash, I'm looking for smoke grenades, flashbangs, lots of explosions. Can you do that?"

Erash smiled. "I'm insulted that you even ask."

Garrus looked over to Monteague. "Luc, you know your abilities better than me. Do whatever you can to confuse the hell out of them."

Monteague's bald head bobbed. "I suppose I can try."

"If it all gets too scary, you could always stand behind me," Weaver said with a mocking grin.

"It would only be natural for the apes to go before the humans," Monteague said acidly.

Weaver shrugged. "You call me an ape as if it's an insult. Just wait until I get my water cannon."

_It's a madhouse_, Butler thought.

"If we're going to be facing krogan, we have to keep a strong vanguard," Garrus went on. "Weaver, you've got your Revenant. Ripper, what are you packing?"

"Armax Brawler-C, sir."

"So that's more for precision," Garrus mused. "Melenis, we'll need something bigger from you to balance it out."

"We've been working on a heavy machine-gun that links into his suit," Sensat said. "850 shots per minute, capable of firing without thermal clips for eighty seconds. His body absorbs the excess heat."

Garrus clicked his tongue. "Impressive. Is that ready to go?"

"I believe so," Melenis said.

"Then that's perfect," Garrus said. He stood up and leaned over the table, placing his fists on it. "Listen, I can't repeat this enough. Save the slaves. The really lucky ones might end up on Illium. The lucky ones will be sold here. And the rest will end up in Hegemony space. There aren't a whole lot of things worse to be than an alien slave out there. Frankly, if the ships launch and somehow get to a point where all we can do is destroy them or let them go, we should destroy them. You've all seen the reports. Death is better."

_Who are you to say that?_ Butler almost said, but he held his tongue. _Not the time for moralising._

A few seconds passed in silence, then Garrus stood back. "Right. We all have preparations to make. Let's get to it."

* * *

In some ways, Ripper felt the lack of discipline and professionalism was refreshing. In others, it deeply worried him.

No, he realised, 'worried' wasn't the right word. 'Unsettled' was closer. 'Worried' implied he didn't think Archangel could get results, and if anything those doubts were much lesser than they'd been before. Nothing he had said or done had been revolutionary or brilliant, but Ripper couldn't fault _him_; it was his situation that was precarious. _A man like that could have been a great general in time, if he'd stayed with the Hierarchy. For now... his tactics are unconventional, but he knows his troops better than I do. And, more importantly, he's my commanding officer._

The lack of good intel and support had been another awkward bump to stumble over. He could still do his job, but it was that little bit harder. It felt like trying to fire a favourite gun with the trigger an inch lower and the recoil three times as heavy: manageable, but difficult.

He pointedly didn't sigh, and went back to his methodical ritual of checking his pistol. He'd done it six times already, and it was as ready as it would ever be. It seemed out of place next to the pieces the other two members of the vanguard were hefting: Weaver's Revenant was a beast of a machine already, although the human was big enough that it seemed almost normal-sized in his massive hands, but Melenis's heavy machine-gun was something else entirely. It was probably one-point-five metres end to end if not more, a huge, dark, angular block of metal hooked into the back of the volus's suit by two thick cables. Melenis was fully unfurled, standing even taller than Weaver. Both of them dwarfed Ripper.

Another interesting new experience was that rather than waiting for the green light in a shuttle or drop-pod or ground vehicle, the three of them were in a dark, empty alley between two warehouses. The distraction team was positioned in the corresponding alley on the other side of the road, while Sensat and Butler had taken to the roofs to coordinate and seek out any sensors. _Our techies sitting on flat, open rooftops! Even when there's no danger of sniper fire, that still goes against everything we ever did in V-33..._

He had tried to get over V-33. It was impossible. Every time he'd put it out of his mind for even a few minutes, he'd glance up and see the glass cracking and creaking under an ocean's worth of the feelings he'd fought back for a decade. Sometimes, when he visualised it – and it wasn't even by choice, more as if the visual metaphor he'd constructed for himself had taken on a life of its own – the water almost looked like blood.

_It seems so unfair. We did everything right on that mission. We neutralised their comms, slaughtered everything they sent at us, eliminated three of the most prolific slavers on record, located and secured four hundred prisoners... and then they detonated those charges and killed nearly five hundred people out of sheer, bloody-minded spite. That, or some insane krogan notion of 'glory'. And how many have died for that?_

"Cameras looped, thermal sensors desynced from alarm systems," Sensat said over the general comm line. "That's all they had. The way is clear."

"OK, move up," Garrus said tersely. "Stick to the shadows."

Weaver snorted as he pushed away from the wall. "They aren't going to bloody miss _us_, you know."

The three of them began to move quickly down the street towards the huge double doors of the first warehouse, keeping to the shadows cast by the towering, featureless blocks of the surrounding buildings. Most of Omega was crowded and densely populated, but the warehouse districts were avoided by most. Vorcha still nested in abandoned structures, but the stranglehold of the gangs and merc groups was absolute down here. Just about the only rule anyone on Omega followed with any consistency was 'don't go down there if you know what's good for you'. _Which is, of course, the exact reason why we're here._

"Erash, go ahead," Garrus said. "We'll cover you."

"Oh, yeah," Erash muttered, still audible over the comm lines as he broke away from Garrus's team and ran ahead. "Send me first. I say you're still just pissed because I shot you."

Somehow, that didn't fill Ripper with confidence.

The salarian reached the ten-metre-wide warehouse doors and unhooked a satchel from his shoulder. He took out what looked like a simple metal cylinder and placed it carefully against one side, where it fastened itself, then repeated it for the other side. That was the signal to get into cover, and Ripper followed Weaver and Melenis to the right of the doors, going another ten metres.

"Clear," Melenis said.

"Clear," Garrus echoed. "Let's go."

Ripper knelt down and covered his ears.

"Fire in the hole, boys and girls," Erash said.

* * *

The explosion wasn't all that impressive visually; all Butler really saw was a muted orange fireball and a venomous-looking cloud of dark smoke that boiled up and away towards the kilometre-distant ceiling as the doors of the warehouse disintegrated. What _was_ impressive was the cataclysmic noise it produced, a huge earth-shaking snarl flavoured with the shriek of shredded metal. He winced as he took his hands away from his ears, which were ringing even this far away. He shuddered to think what it would have been like for the six on the ground. They'd already disappeared into the smoke, and as he watched he could just make out the telltale signs of gunfire, faint blue flashes flickering up through the cloud like a distant lightning storm.

He muted his mic and turned to Sensat. "That's that, then."

Sensat nodded. "Let's go."

They headed down the stairs and to the nearest aircar, listening to the sounds of battle all the way. The gunfire was audible only as a quiet series of muffled rattles punctuated by the occasional louder explosion. There was an odd detachment to the whole affair, Butler thought. Just for a moment, he felt a pang of guilt for not being there with them. _And my own hands are still nice and clean..._

Sensat piloted the car as they headed back to the spaceport. The short journey passed in silence between them, but all the way there was the sound of Garrus's voice, giving orders and getting updates. They'd found bodies. It was impossible to ignore, a constant reminder that there were people putting their lives on the line as he listened to it, one made all the more jarring by the juxtaposition with his own comfortable surroundings.

_I'm not a killer,_ he tried to tell himself, but he knew that one was a lie.

* * *

The slavers came, and the slavers died.

Ripper had automatically taken stock as they emerged through the smoke and into the cavernous depths of the warehouse. It was maybe fifty metres by forty by eight, unusually empty for such a huge room. _Then again, its wares are hardly normal. _To the left, there were maybe a dozen blue shipping containers of a type he recognised all too well. They were small enough to fit on the back of a standard truck, and big enough to hold about twenty people. There was a truck for each one, accompanied by twenty or so battered aircars parked almost at random.

On the right, there were prefabricated buildings, obviously only meant for temporary shelters. There were a few batarians in sight, jumping up from the table where they'd been playing cards, and more of them began to pour out of their accommodation at the sound of the explosion. About two thirds of them were armed, and there were only about twenty.

The next few seconds happened very quickly. Ripper was aware of all the component parts – Erash's smoke grenade that landed right at the feet of one unfortunate slaver, Archangel and Monteague's sniper fire, Weaver's Revenant chattering away to his left and Melenis's cannon to his right, his own pistol firing again and again at the shapes staggering through the smoke – but all he focused on was his own aim. It was difficult to see, but he thought that he'd brought down at least two.

The gunfire died down and stopped. The slavers hadn't even come in range of his biotics; as the smoke swirled away, almost two dozen bodies were strewn across the floor.

"Everyone feeling warmed-up?" Archangel said, after a short pause. "Let's go."

"Sir," Ripper said quickly, "those containers might have people inside-"

Archangel cursed under his breath. "You're right. Check 'em. Fast."

They spread out among the aircars towards the containers and began smashing their way inside. A few of them were already open and empty, but the one Ripper came to was doubly locked: once with an antique-style padlock and once with two heavy bolts. _Manual locks. Effective. Fitting, as well: slavery's a relic. Why not its trappings too?_

He wrenched back the bolts with a pair of rusty screeches, then stepped back and concentrated. Pins and needles raced up his left arm and sent icy shivers flickering down his spine, and his hand took on an eerie blue glow. One twist of his wrist shattered the padlock, and another yanked the door open.

They'd been and gone. The container stank of too many bodily fluids, but there was another overpowering stench in the air. It was emanating from the dead turian lying face-down on the floor. He looked about twelve, but it was hard to tell. He'd been dead for days.

He closed the door again and breathed in deeply. _Do not react. Do not let yourself be ruled by emotion. Do your job._

He had seen worse. In the end, it was just another drop in the ocean.

"Nobody alive," he reported.

"Dead asari in here," Weaver said. "Nothing else."

The reports came in one by one. Six bodies total, all beginning to decay. Ripper's hadn't even been the youngest.

Archangel's voice was painfully cold when he spoke. His face was hidden by his helmet, but Ripper could hear exactly how set his jaw was in his voice. "They'll pay for this. Let's move."

_Agreed_, Ripper thought, and then immediately reprimanded himself for it. _Personal, but not revenge. Remember._

They'd wasted no more than twenty seconds on the containers, but it had been enough. The doors to the next warehouse were already sliding open as the six of them started to head back that way, and then heavily-armoured krogan were pouring through the gap, wrestling and shoving each other out of the way in their haste to get to the battle.

The accommodation must have been segregated, Ripper reasoned. The batarians had been easy prey on their own, but krogan were another matter, and there were a lot of them. Twenty batarians could go down in one good volley. Twenty krogan would laugh it off. _Archangel was right, then. That was the warm-up._

"Vanguard, form up," Archangel ordered. "Cut them down."

Ripper was already shadowing Melenis, and Weaver appeared on his right as the first shots flew. A machine-gun roared on either side of him, sending electric sprays of fire scything into the krogan ranks. The krogan didn't have the time or the inclination for tactics: a wave of twenty was coming at them like a tidal wave, firing inaccurately as they went.

_Inaccurate, but numerous_. Ripper winced and staggered as some of their shots impacted against his barriers, throwing off one of his shots. He steadied himself, placed his feet well apart, wrapped both hands around the heavy grip of his pistol and fired back. His first target only took two of his shots before a sniper round drilled straight through his crest and into his head, sending a ton of dead krogan crashing down like a felled tree. He shifted his fire left, linking up with Melenis to punch through the shields of an eight-footer. The krogan was coming too fast to reliably aim for the head, forcing him to shoot for the centre of mass. It took nine shots from him and probably ten times that from Melenis to finally bring him down, and even then he was still moving on the ground as yellow-orange fluid pumped out of dozens of wounds.

A grenade went off, bringing down one and blowing the arm off another, who didn't even slow down. Ripper's ears rang again. A couple more fell to sniper fire. The machine gunners brought down three or four, and he got one more by sheer luck, his last bullet before his thermal clip died happening to pulp the krogan's brain. That didn't stop the wave.

He didn't have time to reload. The first krogan was already on top of him, towering two feet over him with a roar like a jet engine. A shotgun the size of a child was aimed at his head, close enough to utterly eviscerate him. Ripper regarded the situation calmly, and dodged. Sparks flew where the bullets missed him, and the krogan whirled – _slow, too slow –_ to find him again. Ripper's arm buzzed with power, and he summoned up some firepower of his own.

It was something of a unique talent, at least as far as he knew. Certainly nobody else in V-33 had ever been able to do it, although Hammer had been able to achieve similar effects on occasion. Butcher liked to refer to it as Ripper's party trick, and insisted on a demonstration for any new members of the team on their first mission. That had been the culture: the more blood you shed and the more impressively you did it, the more respect you got. Ripper had learned that early on, when he'd been the new meat whose lifespan all the old hands had been taking gentlemen's bets on. He'd outlasted most of them, but he'd outgrown the new kid label on his first mission when he'd shown them just what he could do. He'd earned his name faster than most. Before the mission, he'd been 33. After it, he'd been Ripper, by more or less unanimous acclamation.

His hand pulsed with raw biotic energy, and the krogan raised up his shotgun, looking to use it as a bludgeon. Ripper glanced up at it, then back down. The key was to look for the weak points, the stress points: on the krogan's ramshackle armour, the seams and joins were obvious, but without good knowledge of krogan biology... _there._

His hand jerked sideways like a knife. There was a terrible sound, a crunch and crack and squelch all rolled into one, and the war-cry became a scream. Two halves of a krogan slammed into the ground. Yellow fluid pumped out from the remains like water from a hose.

He could hear Tsunami's voice in his head, still as clear as the day he'd heard her say it all those years ago. _Holy shit, 33! You ripped the son-of-a-bitch in half!_

Ripper shook away the memories and put a round into the krogan's skull, cutting off his dying screams. The battle was raging all around him; Melenis staggered past, grappling hand to hand with another krogan as his machine-gun dangled abandoned at his side, and Ripper reached out again with his mind. The krogan's left arm separated from his torso with a harsh tearing noise, sending him stumbling back in shock as Melenis recovered enough to snatch up his gun again and finish him off with an inescapable hail of short-range fire, then Ripper was ducking away as another krogan levelled a shotgun at him and fired –_ half the shields gone, can't take another one of those –_ and blasting the huge alien ten feet into the air with a two-handed burst of biotic energy, then he was firing on another as it bore down on a backpedalling Weaver, just in time to kill the krogan's shields as Weaver slammed his new thermal clip into place and shredded its entire torso into an explosion of yellow fluid and disintegrating flesh inside two seconds, then stumbling back as another grenade went off with a shattering bang and vivid orange fireball, and then he remembered to breathe.

The sheer lethality of Archangel's team was beyond his wildest expectations. Somehow, they all seemed to be working more or less in sync; the sniper fire was devastatingly accurate, the explosives were throwing the krogan into even more chaos, and the machine guns were linking up to lay waste to the oncoming horde. If the krogan had been smart enough to use their superior firepower to pin them down and force them into cover, there might have been a problem – but they were krogan, after all, and they much preferred close combat. That suited Ripper fine.

It had been about fifteen seconds since the krogan had started pouring into the room. More than half of them were dead, and the floor was slick with gore. The last few were being cut down even faster; their shields were already damaged and their cover (namely the other krogan) was dead on the ground. Another one made it through the MG fire and came for Ripper, and he threw himself out of the way of another deadly shotgun blast. He twisted on the floor, summoning up every scrap of biotic energy he could muster, but Melenis had got there ahead of him and was riddling the krogan with holes, the roar of his gun enormously loud in Ripper's ears. Ripper scrambled up, making a note to thank the volus later, and saw yet another krogan coming at him. _I must look like an easier target than Weaver or Melenis... that, or they really despise turians. Likely both._

This one seemed to have forgotten he was holding an assault rifle – _more like an LMG, actually_ – and was using it as a combination battering ram and club, looking to smash Ripper's head in. He had to concede that given the usual krogan accuracy and quality of his own shields, it was actually more likely to kill him like that. His hand was still singing and prickling with biotic power, and he reached out with his mind. Tearing krogan apart took a lot out of him, and he'd built up a heavy biotic debt over the last twenty seconds, so he looked for an easier option than dismemberment. He found it.

He turned his mind into a knife and stabbed straight down behind the krogan's scratched green crest, then changed the knife into a jack and poured every iota of power he had left into it. The entire crest shivered, then peeled away with a sound like lacquered wood being snapped in half. The krogan dropped to his knees, his gun discarded, screeching in terrified agony and trying to hold his head together. Ripper shot him five times, then reloaded and added three more. He looked up.

Twenty-three krogan lay dead on the floor.

"Je_sus_," Weaver said, coming up beside Ripper to look down at the krogan whose crest he'd torn off. The barrel of his Revenant was still hissing with excess heat."Guess that's why they call you Ripper, huh?"

"Any wounded?" Archangel said. There was something odd about his tone, Ripper realised. It was as if he wasn't expecting there to be, but with that volume of fire and that many krogan surely somebody had taken a hit.

"I think we're good," Erash said. "In every sense of the word."

"Then let's go," Archangel said, and headed for the door the krogan had come through, picking his way through their corpses. His boots splashed in the great pools of yellowish fluid leaking from them.

_**That's** his response to six men taking down two dozen krogan without taking a single injury? He wasn't even surprised! Nobody was!_

Ripper followed him, ignoring the sharp pains across his body as his punished biotic cells regenerated. He didn't understand how it had happened. Six members of V-33 might have gotten the same result, but they were the best, the most highly-trained professionals the Hierarchy's armed forces had to offer. There was no conceivable way that such a disparate group of what were, at best, talented amateurs could match that performance. _Is there?_

_Perhaps I underestimated Archangel even more than I thought I had. Or perhaps he's just riding his luck to an extreme degree._

"Vanguard through first," Archangel said as they reached the door. "Go."

Ripper went through first, with Melenis and Weaver on either side of him. Nobody came to greet them. The krogan accommodation was a chaotic mess of old converted trailers and ramshackle prefabs, and some of them had obviously been camping out on the floor. There was nothing else in the warehouse. The sheer amount of unused space was highly unusual, Ripper thought, but then he realised why that might be. _They're still recovering from Thekal, but they think they can get back on their feet. This isn't wasted space. This is room to expand._

He bit back hard on the anger the idea that they were planning on running thousands of slaves through these warehouses stirred in him, forcing it away. _Do not let yourself be ruled by emotion_, he said inside his head. _Do not let yourself be ruled by emotion. Do not let yourself be ruled by emotion._

Sometimes, it seemed like that mantra was the only thing keeping the glass overhead intact and the ocean at bay.

"Move out," Archangel said, and began to say something else before being drowned out by a painfully loud roar, one that shook the entire foundation of the building under them. Archangel ran for the next door with the rest of them in hot pursuit, the cacophony still blasting away, but it was fading by the time they got there. When the door slid open, all there was to look at was a near-empty hangar, its only contents nests of wires and supports and access tubes lying discarded on the floor. The roof of the warehouse had slid open, and through it Ripper could see the rapidly disappearing lights of two ships, their engines still echoing faintly through the twilight.

"Damn it," Archangel hissed. "Sidonis, have you got Sensat and Butler?"

"Yep," Sidonis said. "Need a ride?"

"Yeah," Archangel said, clearly unhappy. "The third warehouse in. Make it quick."

"There in two."

"The buggers won't get away," Weaver said, shrugging. "Not with pieces of crap like the 86, anyway. We'll stop 'em."

"With boarding actions?" Monteague said. "They'll fight to the death. If they saw we were winning, they'd probably hit the self-destruct."

Weaver snorted. "Afraid?"

"Sane," Monteague shot back.

Monteague mentioning the self-destruct was a punch in the gut for Ripper, though he doubted the human knew it. He grimaced, and forced back more upstart memories. _About the only thing worse than being dragged down with your enemy when you've beaten them is being the only one to survive it._ He'd told Garrus that he'd survived with cuts and bruises, which had been true. He hadn't mentioned the crippling radiation sickness that had come with the miniature nukes. Or the subsequent four-month stay alone in a secret military hospital. _Or the funeral. Thirty-two coffins, nine recovered bodies, a hundred unidentified body parts, and exactly one mourner._

_Perhaps death would have been better. When the choice is dying for nothing and living for nothing, it's hardly a choice at all. Just semantics. What did survival bring me other than pain? I should have died then, and then there would have been thirty-three coffins and no mourners. It would have been a much neater ending... yet here I am. A walking epilogue._

He stood there and listened to the bickering and joking, not really taking any of it in. He wondered if history was about to repeat itself, if the slavers would press the button and correct the mistake of his survival with nuclear fire. The more he thought about it, the more attractive it seemed. _Death is quick and painless. If only life were as well._

…

_No._

_Stupid. Stupid, selfish, emotional. You're better than that, Ripper._

He'd had the conversation in his head a few hundred times before, but he ran through it again anyway.

_The moment you think that _your _pain is so unbearable, _your _suffering so tragic, _your _life so utterly all-consuming in its importance, you're worthless to yourself and to everyone else. Self-pity is poison, but all it will do is make your death slower and more painful._

A part of him answered: _I don't think that's possible_. He pushed it away, disgusted with himself, but he'd never be rid of it. He knew that much. _And no matter how easily I can see that it's absolutely pathetic to think like that, I'll never stop._

The ship hummed into view overhead a minute or so later, setting down with a heavy clang. He barely noticed it. Its airlock was already open, and a set of metal stairs unfurled. Ripper was the last on board.

_It's been so long, and I don't know what I want. No purpose. I wonder, did I join Archangel because I wanted to do the right thing, or because I was looking for someone to tell me what to do? Or was it because I knew it was practically suicide?_

The deckplates rumbled beneath him as the ship fired up its engines and blasted away into the twilight.

_Or perhaps because I was looking for a purpose. Archangel has one. Would it be so surprising if I was drawn to him? Maybe I'm not alone in that. I told him he was a purpose. Did I believe that? Do they? Does he?_

_Too many questions, but perhaps that's better than no questions at all. At least it's a start._

_It's a start._


	37. A Tooth For A Tooth: Outlived

**A TOOTH FOR A TOOTH**

**THREE: OUTLIVED**

* * *

The _Hailfire_ was a hell of a ship, apparently. To Butler, it looked pretty much like any other: the corridors were gun-metal grey and seemingly carefully designed to preclude any possibility of looking even slightly interesting. The exterior wasn't much better: it was boxy, featureless and generally dull. It had none of the design flourishes that made the _Destiny Ascension_ so iconic, or anything resembling the menacing eagle-wings turian design seemed to favour. To the rest, however, it was a big deal.

"Oh, man," Weaver said, looking enraptured as he stared out of the bridge's forward viewing window. "Look at the acceleration on this bastard. If there's one thing I can say for Williams, he knew his tech."

Butler looked. Omega was already well behind them, and had been long before they'd even got to the bridge. Now there were nine of them crowded into it, looking out at space. The screen was bordered by dozens of numbers, constantly ticking up and down with no discernible units or indications of what they actually signified. They were evidently good numbers.

"We should be in firing range within... call it ten minutes, if those 86es are in good shape," Sidonis said, without looking up from his controls. "Plenty of time to spike the fuckers before they hit the relay."

"Right," Garrus said. "Good. Melenis and I will take primary weapons. Sensat, Erash, take secondary."

"So us humans get to stand around looking like morons," Weaver said cheerfully. "Fine by me."

"I suppose it's not much of a leap for you," Monteague said.

"Burn," Sidonis called over his shoulder.

Garrus settled down at one of the weapons consoles, ignoring them. He was slightly hunched over, and Butler had seen the look in his eye when he'd entered the bridge. It had been anxiety, framed by cold anger. _He's wondering if we can get out of today without any more innocents dead. I doubt it._

Butler retreated to what looked like the comms console, further back along the boxy command deck. He wasn't sure exactly what use he'd be there, but he reasoned that it would be better than just standing around. _I'll take anything over feeling useless. _He settled back into a chair slightly too hard to be comfortable and lost himself in a broad array of orange screens, going through the motions as he secured their internal comms, their externals, their links back to the Omega extranet and their connection to the relay. All of it was completely unnecessary.

_Because as long as you look busy, you're helping, right? Stupid idea. Only problem is that I can't do anything else._

He cast a glance back at the others, then turned away again just as quickly. _Sensat's just about the only other one whose job description isn't killing people, but he still carries a gun. He's still killed people._

He looked back again, and his eye landed on Ripper, standing by Sidonis's chair with his hands clasped behind his back. Butler couldn't see much of his face, but what he could see looked oddly calm, even for him. It was faintly disturbing, not least because there were flecks of what was unmistakeably some kind of alien blood on his carapace. Streaks of it ran down his armour, illuminated by the orange glow of the terminals. His serenity seemed utterly at odds with the violence Butler had seen him deal out.

_And he's the worst of all. The rest of them are fighters and ex-mercenaries and so on, but he's the only one who acts like a soldier. And when you get down to it, what is a soldier but a hired killer? Killing for a cause you believe in... that I can just about stomach. Killing because someone told you to? Worse. Much worse._

"You know, Luc," Weaver said thoughtfully, "Ripper here is a much better biotic than you. He ripped a krogan in half."

"Yes," Monteague said. "I saw. It was very impressive."

"So I'm told," Ripper said, without turning. "Severing the dual central nervous system is the best way to neutralise a krogan fast. It simply happens to be a good party trick."

"I'm not getting invited to the right parties, apparently," Erash quipped. "Not that I ever get invited to parties, before one of you bright sparks makes the joke."

"We'll have our own party," Weaver said, "just for you. Everyone can get drunk and watch Ripper tear krogan in half."

"That does sound like a good party," Erash said.

Weaver thumped one massive fist against his chest. "And I'll be the stripper."

Erash snickered. "Oh, good. I'd always wondered what going blind was like."

_It all seems so wrong. Bar talk. They're acting like they're doing nothing but sitting around and drinking together. There are so many lives at stake, but you wouldn't know it to look at them. How can they be like that at a time like this? How can Ripper and Melenis be so calm? How can anyone?_

He didn't understand the way their minds worked at all, and he wasn't sure that he wanted to. It seemed utterly alien to him. His stomach was trying to tie itself in knots, but the only one of them who looked anything like they were feeling the same way was Garrus. He was staring down at his console with his hands on the arms of his chair, restlessly flexing his fingers over and over. His helmet lay discarded on the floor next to him, along with his rifle. Butler was wondering whether he should say something when Sidonis stiffened in the pilot's chair and looked around.

"Uh, Garrus?" he said. "We have a problem."

_By which he means we have an unmitigated disaster_.

Garrus lifted his head. "What?"

"They're, uh, they're..." Sidonis waved a hand helplessly. "They're a lot fucking faster than they should be."

Garrus leapt out of his chair like it was electrified and was at the main console in an instant. "What the... they're meant to be Minarax three! Three! They're pulling five!"

"Five point two," Sidonis said. "Three. Five."

"Those aren't 86es," Garrus said heavily. "They're shelled."

"Which means what?" Weaver demanded.

"The hull is a cannibalised 86, but the inside is something one hell of a lot faster," Sidonis said through gritted teeth. "This is fucking ridiculous!"

Garrus slammed a frustrated fist into his palm. "Divert any power we've got spare to engines. Anything. Sensat, get down there and get us more acceleration."

Sensat nodded and vanished away into the elevator at the back of the command deck. Ripper took his seat at the weapon controls without a word.

The main screen was still chock full of incomprehensible numbers, but Butler was good with numbers. He was beginning to see patterns, and it became a lot clearer when Sidonis called up two small reticules over apparent nothingness. The reticules featured three numbers under each of them – _so that has to be distance, acceleration, velocity?_ With that in mind, he looked closer, and something seemed off about them.

Sidonis put it into words before he could work it out. "Looks like one of them peaked out at five-eight Minarax. We can catch it about ten minutes out from the relay."

"And the other?" Garrus said, without much hope in his voice.

"Six-eight and counting."

"Damn it," Garrus said, with a lot of feeling behind it. He didn't seem to swear very often from what Butler had seen, although that was probably just in comparison to Sidonis. _And Erash. And Weaver. _Still, this time he sounded angrier and more frustrated than Butler had ever heard him. "Sensat, you down there yet?"

Sensat's voice came crackling over internal comms. "Yes."

"We need to hit six-nine Minarax, minimum."

"Impossible," Sensat said flatly. "That's a full half-point above theoretical capacity."

"I don't care if it's impossible, just get us there."

"Impossible does not mean 'difficult', Garrus-"

"I don't care," Garrus said icily. "Do whatever's necessary, just get me six-nine Minarax."

"...very well," Sensat said. "I will try."

The mood in the ship had collapsed into a cold, quiet seriousness in the last few seconds. The jokes had stopped dead and stony faces were staring towards the main screen, but Butler wondered whether that was down to the severity of the situation or to Garrus's mood, which was growing blacker by the second. Butler knew the feeling all too well. His own was going the same way.

_How many are on that ship? How many are we going to fail to save today?_

Another question with an answer he didn't want to hear.

"We're not going to make it," Sidonis said, shaking his head. "Even if we were pulling seven, we'd be five minutes too late. They'd be through the relay before we were even close. We need, we need seven-three minimum. He's right. That's fucking impossible."

"You hear that, Sensat?" Garrus said. "We need seven-three. Get it."

"A mathematical impossibility," Sensat's voice came back, the irritation in it unconcealed. "I am a genius, Garrus, but I am not a god."

"Where's Deus when you need him?" Erash muttered. Nobody seemed to hear.

The room lapsed back into silence. Garrus was standing statue-still, his fists clenched tightly at his sides. Not for the first time, Butler tried to picture exactly what it would be like for him. He himself knew that frustration all too well, from decades of being too weak, too unimportant and too inhibited to do anything of importance when it counted, but that had acted as something of an immunisation. He could accept that sometimes – _often –_ you simply couldn't do anything to change a situation. Garrus was a different matter. Butler knew him well enough – _but still not well –_ to see that his entire Archangel enterprise was based on the idea, the dream that he _could_ intervene, that he could make things better. Here, he was impotent - and worse, it wasn't just an inability to stop the crime, but an inability to punish it. _And I think the latter hurts him more._

Butler was jolted out of his thoughts by the sudden thrum of his implant behind his ear. He'd automatically linked it into the _Hailfire_'s comms, and when he turned to his console he saw that someone was trying to open a transmission with them. He stared at it in disbelief for a second, then looked up.

"Garrus," he said, "the lead ship is calling us. Audio only."

"The one we can't catch is calling us," Garrus muttered. He retreated to his seat again. "To mock us, probably." He sighed, and stared at nothing for a few seconds. Butler was about to ask what he was meant to do when Garrus finally spoke. "Put them through. Let's hear what they've got to say."

Butler nodded, and keyed the call through. He had a very bad feeling about it, which only added to what already felt like a cannonball in his gut. _This call will not be pleasant._

"Ah, Archangel," a voice said, in the unmistakeable rumbling tones of a krogan. "It is Archangel, right?"

The voice was deliberately engineered to be as infuriatingly mild and conversational as possible. For a krogan, that was no mean feat, and Butler could see Garrus's shoulders stiffening with anger.

"Yes," he said coldly. "It is."

"My name is Kron Harga," the krogan said, as if he was introducing himself at a dinner party. "I want you to remember that."

"You're running, Harga," Garrus said. "Krogan are a lot of things, but they're not cowards. Come back and face us."

Harga grunted in amusement. "The quarians and volus squeal like children about it, but the real racism is against us. Ever think about that? We're stereotyped far more than any other race. You see us all as violent idiots who live only to waste themselves away on fight after fight as our species takes another step towards extinction, right?"

Garrus got up again and started pacing."Something like that."

"I like to think I don't fit the mold. Consider me a progressive."

"A progressive," Garrus repeated.

"Well," Harga said cheerfully, "something like that."

"There were bodies in the containers on the ground," Garrus said. His tone was clipped, mechanical. The tone of someone trying very hard to keep it under control. "You packed people – you packed _children_ into those crates like animals, and you're going to sell them like animals. You're a slaver. You're a monster."

"Everything has its price. If you can pay it, why shouldn't you have it? If you can take it, why shouldn't you have it? If you can't defend yourself, you don't deserve to be free," Harga said.

Garrus stopped pacing and turned away until he was facing a wall. "You're justifying murder and slavery on the grounds that nobody has stopped you."

"Yes. And nobody _can_ stop me. Not even the mighty Archangel. I have one hundred and four slaves on this ship, Archangel. Can you stop me?"

"No," Garrus said quietly. "No, I can't."

"But by the looks of things, you'll catch up to the other ship," Harga said. "There are ninety-two slaves on there. Perhaps you'll count that as a victory. Or maybe circumstances will change. The future isn't set in stone. Whatever the outcome, I just want you to remember, Archangel. Remember my name. Remember my face."

The transmission suddenly shifted into video from Harga's end, and a grainy close-up of his face filled the main viewscreen. Most krogan looked the same to Butler, and Harga wasn't unique. His crest was a dark turquoise, his skin slightly paler than usual, his eyes a warm, deep blood-red, and a hauntingly happy smile stretched across his wide face. _Christ, he's genuinely happy. We've destroyed his operation, we're going to catch one of his ships, we've cost him thousands, millions – but he's happy, because he knows he's hurting us a lot more than we're hurting him. Pure sadism._

"Take a good look, little angel," Harga rumbled. "I want you to remember who beat you. I want to be in your dreams. I want to be the face you see when you think about your greatest failure. I want you to _hate_ me, Archangel. I want you to hate me with everything you have and to know that you'll never stop me. I want you to know that there are a hundred slaves - whose lives will probably be a living hell until they're worn out and disposed of - who _you_ didn't save. I want you to know that you're not good enough, and that you never will be."

The smile widened into a death's-head grin, full of knife-like teeth. Butler knew when he was looking at pure, unadulterated happiness, and he was doing just that. There was nothing else in the krogan's expression, and Butler realised with a sickening, icy jolt that he'd never been so afraid of any one person in his life. He couldn't even articulate why; there was just something that horrified him on a fundamental level about the simplicity of Kron Harga. _The worse it gets for others, the happier he is. That's all there is to him. No more, no less._

Garrus stayed where he was for several seconds, then turned and slowly made his way up to the main screen. His hands were very obviously not clenched into fists. Instead, they were flat at his side, and trembling ever so slightly.

"Understand this," he said. "We will meet. Face to face. And then you'll die for what you've done and what you are."

"And what am I?" Harga said, in a tone that suggested he already knew the answer.

"Evil," Garrus said shortly, then turned to Butler and made the universal gesture for cutting off a transmission. Butler obliged him.

Absolute silence descended over the bridge. Garrus walked over to his seat and sat down again, the every sound of his armour scraping and clinking obnoxiously loud by comparison. Butler could hear other sounds: the faint, distant, low-key hum of the ship's engines was always there, but it was quiet enough for him to hear every uncomfortable shift in position, every muffled cleared throat.

He looked over to Ripper again, looking for some change in him. There was none that he could see. The turian still sat in Sensat's vacated seat, unmoving. For some reason, that twisted another kink into the dark coil of emotion wound up tightly within Butler. _How can he do that? How can _anyone_ stay that calm?_ He wanted to go over and shake Ripper, scream at him, do anything to elicit some kind of reaction, and he realised he was far closer to actually doing it than he'd intended. That just made him angrier. _How dare he be so goddamn emotionless when I'm fighting for control?_

He caught himself at that, understanding how utterly unreasonable those kinds of thoughts were, and forced himself to look down at his console again. His mind's eye was replaying the moment on that grainy vid when Ripper had slaughtered – _what, six, seven –_ Blue Suns just to make a point, over and over again. On some level, he was well aware that he was judging Ripper entirely based on that first impression, but he found it impossible not to label him as a killer.

_And why do I always come back to that word?_

"Garrus," Sidonis said hesitantly, "I'm picking up... well, _something_ on scanners."

"Weapons?" Garrus said. "Reinforcements? What?"

Sidonis didn't respond for a couple of seconds. When he did, his voice sounded odd, slightly choked. "It looks like debris, but, but it's originating from the slower ship..."

Butler took a moment to digest it, and then he knew. His mind went numb, and his body followed.

Kron Harga's words echoed in his head, mocking and smug and lethal. _"Or maybe circumstances will change..."_

"Put it on the main screen," Garrus said, sounding slightly puzzled. _God, he hasn't even worked it out yet._

"There's nothing to see. It's too small," Sidonis said. "Two metres max, and no more than three or four at a time. It's not a threat, but I'm picking up more of it... looks like a delay of about thirty seconds between each wave."

"Could they be mines?" Garrus said doubtfully. He rose out of his chair, leaning forwards to frown at the empty starfield on the main display.

"They're missing us by thousands of kilometres," Erash said. "Look." Butler looked. He saw the objects highlighted by small targeting icons on the screen. They were too small and too distant to get any kind of visual on them, but he didn't need one. His stomach seemed to turn into a lump of ice as he watched the icons fly past and disappear off-screen.

Erash shook his head. "Not mines. It can't be..."

He trailed off. When Butler looked at him, he saw the expression he knew had to be on his own face. Dull, gaunt shock.

"Oh, Jesus," Monteague said softly. He sat back, his bald head in his hands. "They did it."

"They did what?" Weaver demanded. "What the hell's going on?"

There was a soft thump as Garrus collapsed back into his chair. It was definitely a collapse. Butler had been watching him out of the corner of his eye, horrified fascination at what his reaction would be stopping him from looking away, and he'd seen Garrus's knees buckle.

Melenis hadn't reacted visibly. Butler was used to that. What he wasn't used to was the blank look on Ripper's face as he surveyed the viewscreen. _He knows, and this is his reaction. Nothing._

"They're people," Weaver said suddenly. "Oh, God, they're people."

Butler watched him as the colour drained from his face. He found that he was vaguely surprised. He'd expected Weaver to be more stolid, but behind the big man's beard his face was deathly white, and his eyes had the brittle quiver of a hunted animal in them.

"Sensat," Garrus said in a low voice. He was leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees and his forehead on his hands. He looked a beaten man. "You heard."

A pause. Then: "Yes."

"Seven-three. Please."

"I will try," Sensat said, then abruptly cut the channel completely.

The bridge descended into silence once more. They wouldn't catch the slower ship for some time, although Butler couldn't have said how long. Neither he nor anyone else spoke. There was nothing to say. All there was to do was to sit and wait while the _Hailfire_ powered along, and to watch as the slavers pushed ninety-two people out of the airlock to die.

_Ninety-two._

* * *

_Ninety-two._

Ripper watched the bodies flick by on the viewscreen. He felt nothing. If he'd been there in person to watch them kicking and screaming as they were dragged to the airlock, there would have been an emotional reaction. As it was, he just saw icons and numbers. His mind told him that ninety-two innocent people were going to their deaths as he sat and watched, and he couldn't find any visceral response to that inside himself.

He hated that absence of feeling. It scared him. It made him feel as if he didn't care, but he knew why he couldn't react strongly to every death. He'd seen too many of them. Like a bacterium surviving wave after wave of antibiotics, he'd become immune to it, and he hated that too. He hated that he wasn't blaming himself. He had instantly rationalised it, known for a fact that there was nothing they could have done with the knowledge they had which could have resulted in a better situation, and he had expected that not to be enough for him. He'd been wrong.

_A guilty conscience caused by the lack of a guilty conscience. A bitter paradox._

The command deck was as silent as the grave. Ripper examined the expressions on the faces of the others with a detachment he was unable to remove, feeling as if he were watching them from the other side of a one-way mirror. There was Melenis, unchanged, still sitting at his controls. Weaver, pale and clearly badly affected, sitting on a stair and staring at his boots. Monteague leaning against a wall, with knife-edge lines drawn on his stony face by white-hot rage and his eyes full of an ocean-deep sorrow. Butler, who just looked numb, almost on the verge of tears. Erash, with every muscle in his face drawn taut, mixing anger and incredulity. Sidonis, who was staring at his console with unblinking, empty eyes.

And Archangel. There may have been seven other people in the room, but Ripper had never seen anyone look so alone. He hadn't moved a muscle in five minutes, and he hadn't looked away from the floor in all that time. When he'd spoken to Harga, he'd been down but determined, beaten but not broken. Now, with his back bent and his head bowed, he looked like he was staring down his own personal event horizon.

Ripper knew the feeling. He'd felt it before. He just couldn't feel it now.

Sensat's voice rasped out of the speakers, making Ripper jump slightly. "I've got six-point-eight-two. I can't get anything more without a complete engine retrofit."

Archangel didn't lift his head. "Seven-three."

"Pushing this ship any further is near-suicide," Sensat snapped. "I will _not_ endanger us all to meet an impossible goal."

"I'm giving you an order," Archangel said, but there was no authority left in his voice.

"Then I'm disobeying it," Sensat said sharply, then relented a little. "They're gone, Garrus. That can't be changed. We have to be realistic."

"Why?" Archangel murmured. "What's so good about reality?"

Nobody seemed to want to disagree with him there, least of all Ripper. Archangel said nothing more, which seemed to be taken as an acknowledgement of the impossibility of what he was asking as the line went dead. He still hadn't moved.

All the time, Ripper had been counting the bodies. The last three to float silently past the _Hailfire_ had been eighty-nine, ninety and ninety-one. He wondered who that last survivor was. Someone who'd fought hard enough to save their life for a few minutes, perhaps. _Or perhaps someone too small to be a threat. That would be the efficient way to do it. Space the strong first, before they become truly desperate. Kill the adults, because their children cannot save them._

Ripper knew the way slaving rings operated. In a modern galaxy, it was confined almost entirely to the Terminus Systems and Hegemony territory. The Council, for all its faults, had at least managed to practically eradicate slaving in its space. It was becoming harder for slavers all the while, and they dealt with their difficulties ruthlessly. It was always a cut-throat business. No other came close. But as profit margins thinned, so the business changed.

Few organisations were simply slavers. They had diversified. Slaves were less frequently bought and sold than they were rented and leased to whoever had the money. The cost of acquiring a single slave was high, and so those taken became more carefully chosen. The men were strong, good for use not in manual labour – that was found cheaper elsewhere – but in the endless wars and skirmishes the batarian Hegemony was constantly wracked with. The women were invariably young. The children were the most highly-prized, because they were easier to break and to groom and to mold into whatever fetched the best money. And if the order had been given to space the slaves, then the last ones to go would be the youngest.

The last icon flicked out onto the screen, looking as substantial as a mote of dust. It seemed to float gently towards the_ Hailfire_, although Ripper knew that the relative velocities were immense. Within ten seconds it had passed them and disappeared.

_Ninety-two._

_Thirty-two almost destroyed me. Ninety-two is just a number. It shouldn't be that way. I wish it weren't. _

_I gave up my name, my family and my face for V-33. Perhaps I gave up still more, and didn't even know._

"Eighty seconds to firing range," Sidonis said, some time later. Ripper hadn't been keeping track. It could have been just a few minutes or ten times that.

Archangel nodded. It was the only movement Ripper had seen from him in a long, long time. "And Harga's ship?"

"They hit the relay nine minutes back." All the brashness and youthful self-importance had gone out of his voice, leaving nothing behind but a steady, hollow tone. "They could be anywhere in the Terminus Systems by now. Just us and them."

Archangel took a few seconds to react, then slowly straightened up and called up his console. Its orange light glinted on his visor, making his eyes invisible to Ripper. "Then we target their engines, their power conduits, their weapons systems."

"Sir," Ripper said, "they've jettisoned their entire cargo."

"I'm aware of that, Ripper," Archangel said, without looking at him. "I intend to board."

Before Ripper could raise another objection, Butler suddenly sat up straight in his chair and clasped a hand to his ear. As all eyes turned to him, his brow darkened and his free hand clutched tightly at the arm of his chair.

"It's the slavers. They want to surrender," he said in flat disbelief. "They know they can't escape. They say they're killing all their systems." He listened for another few seconds, then sat back and closed his eyes. "They say they were only following orders."

"They're slowing down," Sidonis said. "All power offline except for life support. Shields disabled."

"A trick," Monteague muttered. "They mean to lure us in and then destroy us. I say we kill the sons of whores here and now."

"No, no, they couldn't power up fast enough," Sidonis said. "This is textbook surrender. They couldn't even overload their reactor."

"This ring has access to nuclear technology," Ripper interjected. "They may well have a self-destruct of some kind."

"I'm going aboard," Archangel said, and with a sinking feeling Ripper recognised the finality in his voice. "They seem to think that we'll let them go. Maybe Harga lied to them about who we are, maybe they think we can be bargained with. I don't care. You can follow me, or you can stay on the _Hailfire_. Your choice."

Ripper blinked. _Where did that come from?_ He'd thought that Archangel had been too far gone, at least for today, but now his every word carried more decisiveness than Ripper had ever heard from him before. His voice was cold, and hard, and utterly unforgiving.

In the ensuing silence, Ripper began to have a very bad feeling about Archangel. Decisiveness was good, but everything could be taken too far. When Ripper looked at him, there didn't seem to be any major change – and then Archangel's eyes swung around and met Ripper's, and his heart skipped a beat. Those eyes frightened him very badly, and he couldn't say why. It was more than just their pitiless, steady, ice-blue burn; there was something there that slid a frozen hand down Ripper's back and throttled his nervous system, and he couldn't understand what it was until he realised he was looking at it the wrong way. It wasn't that he could see _something_ in his eyes. It was the opposite. He couldn't. What he was looking at was the complete absence of limiting factors, of constraints and rules and codes and anything that would have held him back on any other day. He was staring into an abyss that was staring back.

He could only hold Archangel's gaze for a moment before looking away, at his boots, at his console, anywhere but into those eyes. He'd been right, he realised. Archangel had been a man at breaking point, and he'd gone straight past it and into the uncharted waters on the other side.

It took them three minutes to overhaul the powerless ship, three minutes which passed in silence. It was a new silence, no longer one of despair and defeatism but one of unease, almost verging on fear in places. Everyone on the bridge could see what was happening to Archangel, and Ripper could feel the worries growing.

When they docked with the slaver vessel, Ripper found himself expecting everything to be blown to hell any second. If they had a hidden self-destruct, activating it now would destroy both ships. There didn't seem to be one. _So perhaps they genuinely do think they can survive today._

The airlock on the _Hailfire _was designed to land multiple squads at any one time. In the end, the only one they left on board was Sidonis. Even Butler left his console to join them. By his constant anxious glances at Archangel, Ripper guessed that he was hoping to try and restore some of the limits Archangel had shrugged off. _He won't succeed._

Archangel only said a few words, all of them orders and acknowledgements. When they crowded into the airlock, he was looking straight ahead, calm and unblinking, with a pistol hanging loosely in his hand. Although the space was tight already, everyone seemed to be giving him a little more room than was necessary. Ripper's own pistol was clasped tightly in his hand, and his biotics were buzzing. He was near-certain that the slavers were going to open fire on them as soon as the airlock finished cycling, and Melenis had positioned himself front and centre apparently on the same hypothesis, albeit in his non-combat form. Every nerve in his body was telling him to prepare for a fight.

When the airlock finally hissed open, there was no hail of gunfire. Melenis was first through, followed closely by Archangel on one side and Ripper on the other, guns at the ready, but the slavers weren't resisting.

They were all batarian. There were only ten slavers, but Ripper knew even that was more than the average complement for a slaver vessel. The ships were typically secure enough for a few crew to easily hold down ten times their number in slaves, or even more. The slavers were clustered around an open, central hub area at the end of a short, drab, grey corridor, but their weapons lay in a bristly pile on the floor.

There was a rank smell in the air. Ripper knew it. It was the stench of desperate terror, when the mind lost all control over the body. Looking at the floor, he could see traces of various bodily fluids.

"Hi," one of the slavers called, detaching himself from the group and sauntering towards them. Archangel went out to meet him, stepping over the weapons pile as he went. "Listen-"

"Secure the rest of them," Archangel said over his shoulder. "Make sure they've given up all their weapons."

The batarian spread his arms as Ripper shouldered past him with the others, looking annoyed. "This is all our shit. You think we'd try to fight you?"

The batarians weren't even wearing armour, for the most part. One had a worn light battle suit, but the others were just in simple tunics and jumpsuits. As the team surrounded them, guns at the ready, they clustered a little closer together, nervous looks on their faces. A couple of them started muttering something to one another in a dialect obscure enough to evade Ripper's translators. Behind him, the one who must have been their leader was still talking to Archangel.

"OK, here's the deal. We want to live. You can have the ship, we'll give you the codes. You can have it all. We can put you in touch with some people who know the trade, maybe break into it yourself – just don't compete with Harga, he'll fuck you up-"

"The slaves," Archangel said blandly. "You jettisoned them."

The batarian sounded defensive when he answered. "Direct orders from Harga. He said we should flush the cargo, surrender the ship and meet up with him when he got back. Just following orders, man."

"Back from where?" Archangel's tone sounded like nothing more than polite inquiry.

"No idea. We were headed to Garvug, but Harga doesn't tell us what his half of the operation is doing. What does it matter? You'll never find him."

The batarian sounded utterly unconcerned. _Hasn't he looked into his eyes?_

"You flushed the entire cargo, huh?" Archangel said. The false friendliness in it made Ripper's skin crawl. "Must have been hard work."

The batarian snorted. "Mostly kids, you know? They didn't put up much of a fight. Hate to space that kind of money, but orders are orders. You turians know about that, eh?"

"Yeah," Archangel said. "We do."

"So, you want to get going?"

"Soon. What's your name?"

"Gatam, Li'bek Gatam." Ripper cast a glance over his shoulder to see Gatam extending a hand to Archangel, who took it. "You?"

"Archangel."

There was a loud, sickening _snap_, and suddenly the lower half of Gatam's forearm was dangling uselessly at a near-right angle to the rest. The batarian shouted out in shock and pain, and the rest of the crew exploded into a loud jabbering in various dialects, most untranslatable. There was the sudden smell of panic in the air, and some of the crew tried to force their way out of the circle of guns surrounding them. Ripper smashed one in the gut with his pistol, sending the batarian sprawling. The others were driven back easily, without a single shot fired. The shouting died down, and a deathly, terrified silence descended over the crew as they realised just how much of a mistake they'd made in giving up their weapons.

_And this is the power of Archangel. Garrus is a man. He can die, he can be weak, he can be bargained with. Archangel is an idea. An icon. Undefeatable, unkillable. Incorruptible._

Gatam was still shouting obscenities. Archangel still had his broken arm in a death-grip, and the batarian had sunk to his knees. Archangel stood over him, face still impassive.

"Listen," Gatam panted, "just fucking listen! You can have the fucking ship! What more do you _want?_"

"Justice," Archangel said. "Justice for the ninety-two people you enslaved and murdered. The only thing you have to offer me is your life, and I will take it." He raised his other hand to his ear. "Sidonis, move the _Hailfire _off. Yes. I need the airlock."

That reignited the clamour among the crew, doubling and redoubling it. It seemed to drive them crazy, and they started throwing themselves against the ring of guns again in a desperate effort to break out. This time, Ripper went for a more permanent solution, and slammed his pistol across the jaw of the batarian who tried to get past him. It shattered it and dislocated what remained, sending brownish blood splattering and the batarian reeling and falling, squawking in agony as he tried to hold his face together. None made it out, and still there were no shots fired.

It was oddly quiet. There were still the sounds of groans and gurgles of pain from a few of the crew and choked sobbing from one, but it seemed to Ripper as if the room was holding its breath in morbid anticipation.

Archangel reached down and grabbed Gatam by the collar, dragging him to his feet. Gatam screeched in pain as his broken arm was twisted up behind his back, and Archangel began forcing him towards the airlock.

"Wait, wait, _wait_!" he wailed, trying to dig in his heels and stop the advance. He couldn't. Archangel was too strong for him, and Gatam's boots were skidding and sliding as they went. "We were just following orders! We had no fucking choice!"

_There's always a choice, _Ripper thought.

"There's always a choice," Archangel said, almost as the thought passed through Ripper's mind.

Archangel muscled Gatam past the discarded weapons, Gatam's kicking sending them scattering. "Come on, man," he was pleading, "don't, stop, _please_-"

"Please?" Archangel said thoughtfully, without stopping his inexorable advance towards the airlock. "You want mercy!"

"Yes!" Gatam howled. They were only a couple of metres away now.

"Did they?"

"What?"

"Did they?" Archangel repeated, coming to a stop just short of the airlock, pressing the batarian's face right up against the small, circular window set into the hatch. All Ripper could see of Archangel was his back, but he could imagine the eerily calm look on his face all too well, and at the heart of it those bright, pitiless eyes. "You dragged ninety-two people to their deaths down this corridor. How many of them begged for mercy? How many of them pleaded for their lives?"

No response.

"How many?"

Gatam whimpered as Archangel twisted his arm further. Despite himself, Ripper winced.

"How many?"

"I don't know!"

"An easier question, then," Archangel said. "How many of them got the mercy you're asking for now?"

No response.

"How many?"

The question was said in exactly the same tone each time, as if it were just an audio clip running on a loop.

Gatam struggled in vain against Archangel's iron grip. "Please-"

"How many?"

Another twist, another howl of agony. Another question.

"How many?"

"None," Gatam whispered. The sound of it carried all the way down the corridor, and even the groans of the injured seemed to fade away. "None of them."

"Then you have your answer," Archangel said, and pressed the airlock's control panel. The hatch split down the middle, and its two semicircles slid apart. Half a second later, Gatam was sprawling on the floor, and Archangel reached for the controls again. As he did, Gatam looked around and lunged for the door as it closed. Even from back here, Ripper could see the raw, animal terror on his face.

"_No!_" Gatam managed, and then the hatch slid shut. A second later, his face appeared at the window, his fist noiselessly hammering against it, his mouth working desperately.

Archangel stepped back, then reached for the controls one last time.

"Garrus," someone said.

* * *

Butler licked his lips nervously as he approached. Part of him was screaming away inside, demanding to know what the hell he thought he was doing. He didn't have an answer for it, and when Garrus turned and met Butler's gaze, he almost backed down then and there. There was something so _wrong_ about the way his eyes looked, like they were lit from within by some inner fire, like they were somehow too alive.

He forced himself to keep walking. _One foot in front of the other, Mike. You remember that, don't you?_

Garrus stepped forward to meet him, but Butler kept walking, going around and past until he was between Garrus and the airlock controls. Gatam screamed silently at the window, his fist now leaving bloody smears on the window as he beat it over and over. Butler shivered as he turned his back on him.

"What are you doing, Butler?" Garrus said. He sounded too normal, far too normal, as if he were just been making conversation. Butler could almost have believed it, if not for the eyes.

"You can't do this," Butler said, too quickly, almost stumbling over his words. "This isn't right. They don't deserve to die like this."

"You're right," Garrus said, and just for a second Butler let himself hope. "They deserve more than this. So much more, it makes me wish I believed in a hell. Some batarians believe in one, did you know? It's an old religion. The belief is that the soul leaves the body through the eyes - but if the eyes are removed, then the soul is trapped forever between worlds, blind and alone. That's their hell. Exposure to the vacuum of space will boil the eyes out of their sockets, and then their bodies will drift for millennia with those they murdered. It's the closest I can get to what they deserve."

Butler felt himself pale as Garrus spoke. The voice was so controlled and natural, but the words horrified him. "That's not justice," he heard himself say.

"Justice is nothing more than balancing the scales."

"You're not balancing them! You can't weigh one death against the other!"

"Why not?" Garrus said calmly. "We have a saying: one is one. There's a human equivalent: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. One is one."

"But ten isn't ninety-two," Butler said plaintively. He knew that he wouldn't win the argument. Archangel was too sure of his position, and Butler barely understood his own. He knew he was arguing from emotion, he knew that he was doing it in vain, but he didn't care. First and foremost, he knew it was wrong. He just couldn't say why.

"No," Garrus said. "It isn't. But we can only kill them once."

In desperation, Butler looked past him to the rest of the team, surrounding the nine remaining slavers. "You can't all be OK with this! Can you?"

Nobody responded, and Butler suddenly felt very, very alone.

"Luc?" he said, fixing on Monteague. "Come on, is this really-"

"Yes," Monteague said, face inscribed with a rage so acidic that Butler fought off the urge to take a step back, even this far away. "He's right. They deserve a lot worse than this."

"Agreed," Weaver said. More than anything, the big man just looked tired. "Face it, Mike. They killed kids on here."

"Sensat," Butler tried, but the batarian was already shaking his head. "They're your people-"

"No, they're not. We share DNA. Nothing more. Death is too good for them."

"Even this death," Erash said grimly.

"I must agree," Melenis said. "There is no good solution to this matter."

That left just one who'd stayed silent. Butler's eyes fell on Ripper, who returned his gaze levelly.

"It's not my place to choose," he said, before Butler could even speak. "I do as my commander does."

"Then choose," Garrus said, without taking his eyes away from Butler's face. "That's your order."

"Then I choose to do as you do, sir," Ripper said. "That's my choice."

Butler stared around at them, looking for a sign, some weakness or indecision, but he couldn't find any. He was alone.

"Butler," Garrus said, his tone still unchanged, "you have a choice too. You can stand at my side or stand out of my way, but you will not stop me."

"I have to," Butler mumbled. His blood was roaring through his head, making it hard to think. All he could do was stand his ground, but his feet were already slipping.

"Then try."

Butler couldn't remember choosing to throw the punch, but it was one of the best he'd ever thrown. Garrus had instinctively started to dodge, but Butler was too fast. Even so, Butler missed the nose and instead crashed his fist into the blue plastic interface of Garrus's visor, shattering it into tiny pieces that showered onto the floor. Garrus reeled, then caught himself and stood up straight again.

Butler stood there panting, listening to his own ragged breath, feeling the pain as he sluggishly realised he'd probably broken half the bones in his hand. He looked up, and two icy blue eyes looked back. Butler saw something new in them, and as Garrus's own fist hammered into his skull and sent waves of sickening purple washing up and down the inside of his brain, he realised that it was respect.

Then he was falling, drifting in and out of consciousness. He saw boots on a level with his head, some marching and some kicking wildly, some trying to dig their heels in on the floor, some limp. Through it all, he could hear distant shouting and screaming, and above that he could hear the slow, terrible rhythm of the airlock's hatch sliding open and shut over and over again.

After that, he remembered indistinct figures standing over him, a voice saying something about carrying someone, motion, and then darkness.


	38. A Tooth For A Tooth: Epilogue

**A TOOTH FOR A TOOTH**

**EPILOGUE**

* * *

Sometimes, Butler could find Omega weirdly beautiful. The perennial orange twilight was beguiling, and the looming, disparate shapes of skyscrapers and groundscrapers clinging to every available surface of the station was the closest surrealism would ever come to expanding into architecture. The shadows were deep, but a million specks of light dotted them at any hour of the day as distant aircars thrummed back and forth, the utter lack of traffic regulations meaning their paths took on the carefree loops and turns of fireflies in the dark. He liked to sit there, on their apartment's balcony, in a cracked old plastic chair, and watch. Sometimes.

But today, his broken nose was still hurting like hell, his pair of broken knuckles were hot and throbbing, and his head ached. Five days had passed, and the pain only seemed to be getting worse. Today, Omega was nothing but a gloomy mishmash of too-bright lights and impenetrable shadows that hurt the eyes to look at. _And hurts the soul to live in._

Five days, and he hadn't been back to the base. He'd woken up on the ship to the unpleasant discovery that a broken nose was extremely painful to breathe through, then drifted off again until he found himself being half-helped, half-dragged by a grim Weaver into a clinic run by a salarian who'd spoken far too fast for a dazed Butler to keep up. After that, he'd just gone home. He hadn't spoken to any of them since.

He sighed, then winced as he forgot not to breathe in through his nose. He'd considered trying to hide it completely – whatever the salarian had done, it had at least made the swelling almost disappear, although the break in his nose was going to be obvious. He was fairly sure that Nalah hadn't noticed his knuckles – _and why the hell are turian carapaces so damn hard? -_ so his story had been that Garrus had somehow accidentally elbowed him in the face. She'd believed that, he thought, especially when he'd cast it as a result of his own clumsiness. _Then again, she seems like she's psychic sometimes..._

As for the rest, he'd left out the part about the escaping slaver ship and the ninety-two dead slaves._ And the ten dead slavers. There's no forgetting that._

_How can I go back to that? Every one of them went along with it, and it wasn't because they were scared of Garrus, it was because they thought the right thing to do was to murder ten people. It wasn't even execution. That would have been a bullet in the head._

_But they deserved it,_ a voice murmured inside his head. _You can't deny that. And what else could you do to them? Let them go with a stern warning?_

He bit the insides of his cheeks and stared at his bare feet. _It all seemed like such a good idea, once. But so many things did. Coming to Omega, for one. It can't be as bad as they say, we assured each other. After all, we're from Chicago. It sounds like an improvement. Knowing nods all around. Joining Eclipse, even as a techie, even in the above-board departments. And pocketing a pistol and going out for a walk, back in an hour or so, telling her I just needed to clear my head..._

_Bad idea?_ the voice purred. _It worked, didn't it?_

How long had it been since he'd first walked down that bridge? Several months, but he couldn't say how many. _I wanted to help people, and they were the only ones doing it. Stupid. Stupid to think in such simple terms._

_Stupid. It's all so damn stupid. Why try to stop the inevitable? There was no way I could have stopped it, but I tried anyway. Look where that got me. Stupid._ _Stupid to think there was any other solution. Stupid to look for one._

He began to massage his broken knuckles, clamping his teeth tight against the pain. He knew he was just making it worse for himself, but the urge to do it was maddening. _Stupid. You know it's not helping, and you do it anyway._

Behind him, the toughened faux-glass balcony door slid open. He frowned in annoyance.

"I said I wanted some time alone," he said, without looking around.

"Yeah, well," someone who definitely wasn't Nalah said, "what you want and what you get don't often match up."

Butler froze for a split second then leapt up out of his chair, sending it skittering away along the concrete. Turning, he found Garrus standing there, looking less comfortable in civilian clothes than he did in twenty-kg armour.

"Your wife tells me I elbowed you in the face," Garrus said, with a slight smile. "I should be more careful."

"Your visor," Butler muttered. It was the only thing he could think to say. Garrus raised a hand to the unblemished blue screen over his eye and adjusted it minutely.

"Sensat's new model. All sorts of new features. It detects biotic fields, measures breathing patterns, fires lasers..."

"Lasers?" Butler said weakly.

Garrus frowned. "Well, he said it did. I'm not entirely sure whether he was joking. It's hard to tell sometimes."

There was no trace of the cold, steely, merciless Garrus he had seen on the slaver ship, Butler realised. It was just Garrus standing before him: the same Garrus who tried gamely to wrestle his team into order like an exasperated schoolteacher, the Garrus who'd sit around chatting and cracking jokes with the rest of them, who always looked very slightly out of place wherever he was.

_Garrus, then. Not Archangel._

Garrus grabbed another chair from a pile of them against a wall and pulled it up next to Butler's. It creaked ominously as he sat down. Butler gingerly returned to his own, and then the two of them sat in silence, staring out across Omega.

"I could have destroyed it all," Garrus said quietly, after a minute or so.

"What?"

The turian sighed, then reached up to unhook his visor. He laid it in his lap as the screen went blank. He looked strange without it, almost naked. Butler thought back, and realised that this was the first time he'd seen Garrus's face unobscured.

"We don't talk about it much," Garrus said, and then paused, apparently looking for the words. "It was just the five of us – me, Sidonis, Sensat, Melenis, Erash. It was... complicated, and I don't plan on revisiting it, but I am in no way exaggerating when I say that there was a point when, when I was in a position from which I... could have wiped out Omega. Entirely."

_God, he's serious. That's actually true._

"I know it sounds like some convenient thought experiment," Garrus went on, not looking directly at Butler, "but I also had good reason to believe that in the long run – you know, in generations' time – it would have saved more lives than I would have taken. You know what I chose. If it had been otherwise, you'd be dead. Nalah would be dead. Luc and Weaver would be dead. Ripper would be dead. All those slaves would be dead, Harga would be dead... even right up to T'Loak herself. All dead. And..."

Butler could see where it was going as Garrus trailed off. He'd sat, listening, taking it in, and he couldn't understand what he was feeling. He couldn't put a name to it. He wasn't sure if there was one. He tried a few that felt close – sympathy, horror, shock, anger – but they were so disparate and contradictory that he gave up. _I'm too damn tired to feel. Too old. Sitting here while my hair goes grey and an alien tells me about the time he almost killed seven million people, myself included, and it __almost seems normal... either the world's insane or I am. Both, maybe._

Garrus was still silent, looking down into his lap where his hands turned the flashing blue lens of his visor over and over.

"And now, you wish you'd taken the easy way out," Butler said, after it became clear that Garrus wasn't going on.

Another pause, verging on awkward.

"No," Garrus said, finally. His hands kept on twisting his visor. "But there was a moment – on the ship, while we were following them – when I did. An emotional reaction... but all the same, if the choice had been put to me then and there, I would have done it. I don't kill the innocent. That's the rule, that's the reason I couldn't do it in the first place. But I would have then, and that was the trigger. I realised what Harga had done to me, and then things – I don't know – seemed to become a little simpler."

"Purer," Butler murmured. _Purer. I wonder, which is the real Garrus? The one here, or the one with all of his doubts and compromises stripped away? Perhaps that's who Archangel really is. A set of ideas, unbreakable and inflexible. A light in the darkness, but too much light will burn..._

"It's a galaxy full of grey," Garrus said, finally looking up and out into Omega again, "but just for a while, I saw it in black and white. Good and evil." _One is one_, Butler thought. "And so they had to die, because anything else would have been weakness on my part. No, not weakness. Wrong word. It would have been – well – stepping away from doing what's right in the here and now. I've seen where that road leads."

"They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions," Butler said. _And who knows that better than I do?_

Garrus shook his head. "You humans have an aphorism for everything, don't you? Still, I see the point. That's where you're coming from, I guess. You're with us on the intention, but you don't like the method. I understand. Hell, I admire it. If you've got conviction enough to – heh - stand your ground-" Garrus raised a hand to his face and rubbed the eye Butler had punched "-then I respect that. Even if it does hurt like hell."

Butler snorted. "I broke two knuckles doing that, you know."

"So Weaver tells me. Your technique isn't great, but I somehow doubt you'd be willing to improve it."

"True enough," Butler said. Another silence descended, but it had a different flavour to it: more relaxed, more open. Garrus was still looking away from Butler, staring into the distant shadows with a serious, thoughtful look on his face. Butler imagined that his own looked similar.

_And here we are. Where can we go from here? How do we bridge that gap, that chasm between us? How do I reconcile what I want to do and what I have to do?_

"Beautiful, don't you think?" Garrus said.

Butler started slightly. "Hmm? What?"

Garrus gestured out towards the city beyond the balcony. "Omega. It's beautiful from here."

"No," Butler said, a little more harshly than he'd intended. Garrus glanced at him in surprise. "It's either too dark to see or too bright to look. Nothing else."

"Either way, you're blind," Garrus said. "Interesting way of looking at things."

"I'm an interesting man," Butler said, meaning it as a joke, but Garrus looked straight at him with piercing eyes.

"Yes," he said. "You are. Tell me, Butler, when it comes down to the binary choice – the absolute dichotomy, with no middle ground – do you stay or do you go? Do you stand with us, knowing that our actions violate your code, or do you walk, keeping your code but knowing that, without us or people like us, Omega will never change?"

_You bastard,_ Butler almost said. _You know exactly what I'll say. You know that I can't walk away. You know that I know the only tool of any real meaning on Omega is violence, and you know I'll cave because I'm not as strong as you._

_No, not strong. Because I'm not as **pure** as you. Because I can't strip myself down to a code and follow it absolutely, because I can't ignore the greater good when it's only a few murders away, because I'm willing to compromise. Because I'm human._

"I'm with you," Butler said. "You know that."

"For what little it's worth," Garrus said, "I'm sorry it has to be this way, but if it was easy, it would have been done years ago. Nothing's ever easy, and if you try to take the easy route, you just make things worse."

"There's something-" Butler blurted, then caught his tongue. _Stupid! Why would you want to tell him that?_

"Something?" Garrus said.

"It's... it's nothing," Butler said. His heart had started to beat like hell in his chest, and the rush of blood was sending fresh spikes of pain through his head. "Never mind."

Garrus looked at him for a few long seconds, and again Butler felt like those icy eyes were digging deep into him like scalpels, burrowing through to the centre of his mind to probe and dissect every secret buried inside.

"No," he said finally. "I don't think it _is _nothing. I'm not going to ask you to tell me what it is, don't worry about that. But I know it's not nothing."

Garrus rose, pushing back his chair with a quiet scrape. He hooked his visor back on, then stepped around behind Butler's chair.

"Tomorrow, 1600 standard," he said. "You know the place. I'll see you there."

"It was... years ago," Butler murmured. _It's been too long. Too long. And if there's anyone I can trust with this, if there's anyone I can say it to with the knowledge that it won't matter, if there's anyone who I can use to just get it off my chest... it's him, whether I like it or not._

Garrus was still there behind Butler's chair, silent. Butler swallowed and went on, knowing he couldn't have stopped himself now even if he'd wanted to.

"Chicago. It was... we got these, these pictures, physical copies and digital both. Pictures of Nalah, when she was out in town. They kept coming, about once a week. The police either couldn't or wouldn't do anything, probably both. It's Chicago. Too few cops by half, and most of them are corrupt anyway."

_And I never dreamed Omega could be this much worse._

"We stayed in. We were scared. Who wouldn't be? But the pictures kept coming, except now they were looking inside our apartment. Always at Nalah. Then there were letters, classic stalker fare."

_Promises of love, unwritten threats of violence. I've seen the movies. I know how it ends._

"And the police couldn't, or the police wouldn't. For months. The letters got worse, less coherent, more threatening. We tried staying in hotels or friends' places, but he found us every time, and the pictures kept coming, and the letters, and..."

Butler trailed off. _These memories... they were meant to be left behind us. They were meant to stay in that alley, where they belonged, in the blood and the rain._

He took a moment to compose himself, cleared his throat, went on.

"So I hired outside help. In secret. I didn't want Nalah to know, because even then, I knew what I was going to do. The private investigator found the guy inside a week and drained my bank account dry in the process. I had a description, a home address. One night, I drugged Nalah's drink. She was out for hours. I went out, with a pistol in my coat pocket, and found him. I followed him into an alley, then I shot him four times in the back."

The words were coming out in a rush now, years of build-up unleashed all at once. Butler felt oddly calm talking about it. It just seemed like something that had to be said, in this place, in this moment.

"The pictures stopped. The police never investigated. We started going outside again. We left Chicago for Omega in the end; we couldn't get over it completely while we were still there."

His voice started to crack.

"I did it for her. And when I killed him, I felt nothing. Nothing. It was too easy. It was much too easy, and it terrified me to think that I could kill like that. So... I..."

The calm had gone, replaced by the confusion and fear boiling up out of those memories like steam from manholes. Butler gripped the arms of his chair tightly, until the plastic started to creak and crack, and stared out across Omega. _And there it is. It worked. It was the only solution. It was what had to be done. And it was wrong._

"There's nothing wrong with-" Garrus began.

"I don't want you to fucking vindicate me, Vakarian," Butler said through gritted teeth. "I don't want your sympathy. I don't want your bullshit about justice. I want you to understand why I don't kill people. That's all."

Silence.

"Then I understand," Garrus said quietly. "Without condemning or condoning, I understand."

Butler didn't look back as Garrus's footsteps moved towards the door back into the apartment. He just kept on looking at the floor.

The footsteps stopped.

"One thing," Garrus said. "I was taught all my life to – well, to do a lot of things. Most of them didn't stick. There's one that stayed with me above the rest, though. First day of training, they make you take out the ammo blocks from your rifles and give you an engineer's omnitool. You carve your own name into it, then you put it back into the gun. Every shot you fire has your name on it. You own it. Whatever you do with it is your responsibility. You may not like what you've done, but it's your responsibility all the same. You can't escape that. I won't tell you what to do. But I will tell you that if Nalah was my wife, I wouldn't hide what I did from her."

"I did it _for_ her," Butler said thickly. _Hold on to that. _"I love her. The evil I'd do for her..."

"'What is done for love is beyond good and evil'," Garrus quoted.

Butler snorted. "Nietzsche. Really? You believe that crap?"

"No, but that's not the point," Garrus said. "The question is: do you?"

The door slid open and shut, and then Butler was alone.

A couple of minutes later, it opened again. Nalah pulled up Garrus's vacated chair close to him and leaned over, one hand snaking around his neck to stroke his hair, her head pressing comfortingly into his shoulder.

"What were you talking about?" she murmured.

_Life, death. Good and evil, right and wrong. Justice. Murder. The future, the past. The terrible things I would do and have done for you. Courage. Morality. Conviction. Compromise. Purity. Humanity._

_You win, then, Garrus. Archangel. Whoever you are. You're stronger than me, you're purer than me. You make the choices I can't or won't, say the things I can only think, think the things I can't even imagine, bear the crosses too heavy for me to shoulder._

_I pity you._

"Mike?" Nalah said, looking up at him with eyes that could have melted a glacier. "What was that all about?"

"Nothing," Butler said. He forced his eyes away, gazing deep into the darkness of Omega, where blazing lights stung his retinas and yawning shadows reached out with welcoming arms. "Just... nothing."


	39. Leviathan: Shadowed

**MASS EFFECT: INTERREGNUM**

* * *

**LEVIATHAN**

**ONE: SHADOWED**

* * *

_I think that someone is trying to kill me..._

In retrospect, Erash thought, it was probably a good thing that his apartment had only been on the first floor of his building. That way, when he hit the towering pile of trash bags in the alley outside, he only broke one rib.

He fought his way up and out until he was lying on his back, stinking juices covering his shirt and running down his neck. He coughed, and his apartment exploded.

All things considered, it had not been a good ten seconds.

A blinding red fireball punched out of the building ten feet above his head, sending a shockwave of scalding air straight down. It slammed him into the trash again, and the accompanying bang nearly deafened him. Thick black smoke started rolling out of the shattered room, curling away towards the distant rock ceiling as the flames crackled behind it.

A scrap of burnt fabric floated out of the roiling pillar of smoke and twisted in the air, buffeted by the hot currents. It slowly sank down to his level, coming to rest a few inches away from his right hand.

He picked it up and looked blearily at it. It was a fragment of a Hawaiian shirt.

_This would be funny if... no, it wouldn't._

Erash hauled himself up, groaning at the sharp pain in his ribs, half-climbing and half-slithering through the garbage until he could get – unsteadily – to his feet. The apartment was still belching smoke above him, its remaining walls flickering flame-red. Most of the side facing the alley had gone entirely. He couldn't see past the smoke – _but nobody could have survived that, not even-_

A vast, hulking shape emerged through the smoke, advancing towards the broken side of the building. It came to a halt at the crumbling edge of the floor.

_-a krogan..._

Two burning white lights marked where the krogan's eyes would be under the helmet. They focused on Erash, and suddenly his feet were blocks of ice.

"Weak," the krogan said, in a voice like an earthquake. "Like all your kind."

Erash's mouth worked uselessly. _Run, you idiot. Run. Now. Go._

The krogan stepped off the edge. It hit the ground hard enough to leave a sizeable dent in the durasteel flooring the alley, with a clang that echoed around the entire block.

_Run._

"_This _is strength," the krogan rumbled, and extended a hand. Erash's legs belatedly got the message and turned slowly, clumsily, started to run, but a roar of crackling biotic energy punched them out from underneath him. He fell, but didn't hit the ground; he was floating, picked up as easily as a rag doll, turned around and over until he was hanging limply in the air ten feet above the ground, facing the krogan.

Eight feet of jet-black armour started marching towards him. Every footstep sounded like the lid of a tomb smashing down.

Fear rushed through Erash, cold and numbing and colourless, but it seemed to drain away almost as soon as it arrived. It left him feeling empty, hollowed out. It all felt too lucid, like he was watching it happen to someone he didn't really know from very far away. It seemed like some kind of emotional response would be appropriate, but after that short-lived burst of fear, nothing more was forthcoming.

_So this is it. I expected more. Drama. A poignant one-liner. At least a reason._

"You deserve worse than this," the krogan said. "Perhaps my children will find you in the Void and give you true justice."

Erash had no idea what the krogan was talking about, but it hardly seemed to matter. _And in the end, what does?_

The biotic field around him intensified, the air itself snarling and popping with that familiar uncanny blue light, then the terrible pressure started, crushing him, choking him, forcing his blood into his head until he was on the point of unconsciousness – and then there was gunfire, loud and near enough to rattle his teeth, and the krogan was falling back with a massive arm up as a shield, and gravity was back with a vengeance-

* * *

_TWO MINUTES EARLIER_

* * *

_I don't ask for much. I don't get it, either. At least I'm realistic. But this is too far._

Erash turned over in bed and fixed the whining, beeping terminal with a glare that could have killed a man with a weak heart.

_One hour. One hour of sleep a day. It's all I need. Is it so much to ask that people don't fucking call me during it?_

He crawled blearily out of bed and staggered over to the console, pushing a chair out of the way and sending the brightly-coloured shirt draped over it to the ground. He'd set the console to only accept calls marked as 'Urgent', but since this was Omega, every marketing firm automatically used the tag anyway. He found that he was rather looking forward to shouting at some poor fool in a call centre for a few minutes. _Perhaps I'll get Butler to run a trace and then burn the place down._

He hit the 'Accept call' button, then slumped into a chair, sweeping away a couple of decomposing food cartons.

"OK," he said. "Let's hear it, you son of a bitch. Come on."

"He's coming for you," an urgent salarian voice said. "You have to get ready, _now_."

_Ah. A crank call. Wonderful._

"Who?" Erash said, scratching at his bare leg. "The delivery guy? Well, you can tell him that I don't tip people if they've already called me an asshole-"

"Yisma," the voice said, and Erash snapped completely awake. _I know that voice. And he knows me. _"In less than a minute, a krogan battlemaster is going to burst into your room and try to kill you. We miscalculated, we lost him, but you have to act now or you die."

"Achav?" Erash mumbled. It _sounded_ like Achav, but Achav had been sane; this voice was babbling about battlemasters coming for him in the middle of the night – _but he knows my name..._

"_Now!_"

Erash stood paralysed in indecision. It was ridiculous. It was insane. _But he sounds so damn sure. Why would he lie? The first time we talk in years, and __**this**__ is what he has to say to me?_

"Get out of there, Yisma," Achav said. "Just go. Go!"

Something in Achav's voice made up Erash's mind for him. There was real, audible desperation in there; he'd almost been pleading_, _but that didn't make sense either. _Unless he's had a change of heart about hating my guts in the last five years. Even if he had, I wouldn't return the favour._

His pistol was lying on the table along with his belt. He grabbed both then turned for his combat suit, draped over another chair, trying to buckle on the belt with one hand, still frantically trying to piece together what the hell was going on, but he was already out of time.

He hadn't heard the footsteps, but he heard them stop. He heard the floor creak and bend outside his door. He _definitely_ heard the sound the door made as it was smashed down.

It was an old, decaying apartment complex, hanging in the no-man's-land between normal people wanting to inhabit it and being left to the vorcha. Erash's place was one of the only occupied ones in the building. It had been built cheaply, mostly avoiding the luxury of durasteel in favour of that particular brand of recycled waste bricks and plaster Omega's slums were mostly constructed of, but the doors were at least pretty tough. Erash had to give them that. After all, it wasn't the door which had broken. It had just been the wall around it.

The intact door hit the floor with a clang, leaving a gaping hole in the wall where it had been torn clear by the force of the blow. The largest krogan Erash had ever seen stood in the breach. If it had merely opened the door, it wouldn't have been able to fit through; as it was, while the gap was just wide enough to accommodate it, it had to stoop as it entered the room. Black armour covered it from head to toe, comprised of dozens of interlocking plates that sloped up and around a huge, heavy hump before coming down to meet a helmet inset with two dazzling white lights for eyes.

Erash stood gaping. His mind seemed to have temporarily shut up shop and gone home. All he could do was stand there like an idiot, but the krogan had no such problems. It started coming his way.

Later on, when he tried to remember what he'd done, he couldn't recall anything about his thought processes. It had all been running on instinct, an automatic, autopilot response to the situation. He remembered dropping his pistol, which would have been about as effective against the juggernaut as flicking balls of paper. He remembered ripping a grenade from his belt and hurling it at the advancing krogan, then throwing the rest of the belt after it. He remembered sprinting for the open window and diving through it. But most of all, he remembered landing.

* * *

_TWO MINUTES__ LATER_

* * *

Erash lay on his back on a hard floor, watching black smoke curl out of a flaming apartment and into the sky. _No, not 'a' flaming apartment. '__**My**__' flaming apartment._

_Why do I get the feeling that this is not going to be a good day?_

His head hurt. His ribs hurt. In fact, his entire torso hurt, as did his limbs.

"Where the hell is he? _Where the hell is he?_"

Somebody sounded angry, Erash observed. He sympathised.

"Gone."

Someone else sounded cool, clipped, professional. Erash had once tried being professional. It hadn't suited him. People expected so much from you.

"Shit!" There was a wet squelch and rustle behind Erash, and then a split garbage bag sailed overhead, trailing trash like a comet tail. The rotten skin of a paia fruit landed on Erash's bare knee. "Shit! How the hell could you let him get away?"

"With cloaking tech like that? Easily," a third someone said. Erash frowned as he stared up at the buildings foresting the distant rock face. This voice was different. Oddly low. Rumbling. _There's a word I'm looking for, what is it, what is it... ah. Krogan._

Salarians were envied across the galaxy by bleary-eyed salarymen for their ability to wake up completely inside a few seconds. Erash demonstrated it for the second time in five minutes. He sprang to his feet, a snarl of pain escaping his lips as his ribs conspired to catch fire inside him, and whirled around to find three people staring at him. Two were salarians, one in the middle of pointing a furious finger at the other, who didn't seem to be doing anything. The third, standing nearby, was a krogan.

"Yisma," Achav said, lowering his finger from the other salarian's face and striding towards Erash. "Did you see where he went?"

Erash looked at him slack-jawed for a second. Achav still looked much the same as he always had; pale grey skin stretched over two unusally short horns and a high, proud forehead, pocked with two narrow, perennially baleful dark eyes. He even looked like he was wearing the same Pelenin combat suit he'd always used, glinting a gun-metal grey only slightly darker than his skin. Sudden memories flickered through Erash's mind like an old-style slideshow on overdrive, showing him image after image of Achav in the field, usually shouting something at him. _The good old days. My ass._

Eventually, Erash found his voice. "You're not even going to ask if I'm all right? Really?"

"You look fine," Achav said distractedly. "We have to find him. Let's go-"

Erash stepped forward and grabbed Achav by the shoulders before he could turn away. "No. You're going to explain to me exactly why a krogan just tried to kill me. You're going to explain why you only woke me up a minute before it happened. You're going to explain who the hell_ that_ krogan is-" he jerked his head towards the krogan standing with the other salarian "-and you're going to stop calling me Yisma. It's Erash to you, _Achav._"

Achav's grey skin was flickering in the fire's light, making his cheeks look oddly hollow. "This is bigger than you, Erash."

"Not to me."

"No, I suppose not," Achav said coldly. "You never did look at the bigger picture."

Erash relaxed his grip on Achav's combat suit, forcing himself to step back. "Oh, I look at it. I just don't like it. See, the bigger things are, the smaller _I_ am, and the more people seem to think it's OK to let a fucking eight-foot krogan psycho nearly break into my apartment before they do me the courtesy of even _warning_ me! I'm upset, Achav! Can you tell?" His voice had risen to nearly a shout by the end despite his efforts to keep it under control.

"Believe me," Achav said, with a face like iron, "so am I. He's hunting us. He won't be back tonight, we've driven him off... but he's still hunting us."

Erash threw his hands up. "Oh, well, that's just great! Who's he? For that matter, who's us?"

He must have been louder than he realised, because the krogan came lumbering over. He was mercifully small in comparison to the other one, but he still stood well over seven feet in dull rust-brown armour. When he removed his helmet, two wide-set golden eyes glinted out from a blue-purple carapace and looked Erash up and down. Erash could tell when his capabilities were being assessed, but he was fairly sure the appraisal would be at least partially skewed by the fact that he was still in his garbage-stained underwear.

"We have a common enemy," the krogan said. "That makes us allies."

"One krogan tries to kill me, one just wants to be friends," Erash said. "Fucking brilliant. Well, I don't want any part in this, you hear me? I don't know what's going on, I don't _care_ what's going on."

"People are dying," Achav said, "good people-"

Erash interrupted, waving a finger in Achav's face. "I'm done with you, Achav. I'm done with the STG. I'm done with the whole damn lot of you! Six years! Six years, and _now_ you come back and set a krogan battlemaster on me! I came to Omega because it's as far away from Union space as I could go, and I'm not going to let you drag me into this, whatever 'this' is. You can just fuck right off!"

"You're marked," the krogan said. "Like it or not, you're a part of this."

Erash had to laugh at that. "And who are you, then, _ally_? Are you a part of this too? Because let me tell you, you're about half a ton too heavy to be STG. They check, you know."

"Krul," the krogan said, "Grundan Krul. Think of me as a friend of a friend."

Erash looked away from him, up into the air, where that black smoke was still pouring out of his ruined apartment."I don't see any friends of mine here, Krul. Do you?"

"Yes," the other salarian said, and as he stepped out of the shadows and into the ghostly orange-red tint of the fire, revealing the heavy, green-trimmed combat suit he wore, Erash realised that it was the Wall.

"Mierin," Erash muttered. "You haven't changed."

Mierin didn't respond, or even acknowledge what Erash had said. He just looked down, standing six inches or more over Erash as he did, and kept on looking. Erash hadn't lied; he did look the same, his skin the same pale blue mottled with tiny darker patches that multiplied and grew as they came to the horns, by the tips of which they were the only shade. _Make no mistake, he's still the Wall._

"Jolin is dead, Yis- Erash," Achav said wearily. "Nivion too. And Hishau. Cuiron. Rasnus. Hilarom. All dead. Rasnus died last night, on Omega. Cuiron died three weeks ago on Deinech, and Hishau three days before that. Hilarom died on Invictus just over a month ago. And Jolin... two months ago, on Erinle."

It was said with barely a trace of emotion, but Erash could taste the grief and the rage. He'd never liked Achav, or Jolin, for that matter, but he'd known them all well enough to see the way their minds worked. Achav and Jolin had been close, probably the closest two of all the teams Erash had worked on. He didn't like to think what would happen if one of them were to die... but it _had_ happened, and Erash could see the vengefulness bubbling inside Achav as though his skin were transparent.

_Wait a second. The names..._

"This is... all of them were working on Firebreak," Erash said slowly, and suddenly all his anger fell away for a moment. "Achav, what's going on?"

"He knows," Achav said, and silent, murderous rage flashed behind his eyes for a moment. "That krogan. Somehow."

Erash stared blankly at him. "He knows about Firebreak? How the hell is that possible?"

"He has to," Krul said. "That, or he's working for someone who does."

Erash fixed the krogan with a suspicious glare. It felt deeply wrong to talk about Firebreak anywhere near a krogan. "You shouldn't know about it either. Has the STG started handing out secrets like Halloween candy?"

Achav looked at him in confusion. "Halloween?"

"It's a human thing," Erash said impatiently, waving a hand. "It's not important. What _is_ important is the fact that at least two krogan know about Firebreak, and that's very, very bad. Who the hell told them?"

"I told Krul," Mierin said. Erash shot him a filthy look, but the Wall just looked right back at him, unblinking. He didn't seem inclined to say anything to clarify that. _Typical._

"We can explain on the way," Achav said, "but right now we have to go. We've driven him off for now, but there's only one place he'll be going. There's another Firebreak veteran on Omega."

Erash folded his arms. "No. No way. I'm not talking to him."

"Yisma-" Achav started, but Erash shook his head.

"No! He's a psychopath!"

"Then here are your choices," Achav said sharply. "One: come with us. Two: stand around at night on Omega, alone, unarmed, in your underwear. Let's go."

He turned on his heel and stalked purposefully away down the alley, his boots snapping crisply against the metal. Mierin sent one more impenetrable glance sweeping up and down Erash, making him feel utterly naked rather than just mostly naked, then followed. The krogan clumped after them, and Erash watched his retreating back with undisguised distaste.

_Good riddance._

Slowly, it dawned on him that he was, as Achav had said, standing alone on Omega, unarmed, and in his underwear. For a moment he seriously considered calling Garrus – _but we can't afford to let anyone else know about Firebreak. Even friends. We're alone out here. The washed-dregs of the STG against the world._

_I have to go with them, don't I?_

"Fuck it all," he said under his breath, and ran after them as his apartment burned behind him, its hot red light casting his long, wavering shadow in front of him. Even when he rounded the corner after them and left the light behind, his shadow was still there. Unsolicited, the old quote sprang to mind, bounding out of dusty memories of dull, twenty-year-old Literature classes he'd suffered through as a child: _a shadow is a measure not of a body of flesh but of the dark, star-cold and night-black, that is the stain each man writes behind him, as easily fled as the world he walks; and when a man may gaze deep into what lies at his back, also will he see those things he will be, and also will he know the making of himself._

_Load of old shit,_ he told himself, but that didn't stop the quote echoing in his head as he followed the shadows of his past through the place of secrets.


	40. Leviathan: Reunited

**LEVIATHAN**

**TWO: REUNITED**

* * *

Luckily, Achav had a car. Otherwise things might have been awkward; Erash didn't know many cab drivers, but he doubted they would have appreciated his underwear and the faint smell of garbage he was exuding. It would also have meant enforced silence even if they'd taken one of the few automated cabs which hopeful services ran in Omega; they lost enough money on damage and general theft that they had a habit of recording every conversation held inside one of their cars with an eye on selling information to advertisers or, if something interesting was said, Aria.

Achav's aircar was a cheap chopshop model which would likely clap out within a few months, but it seemed new enough that they'd probably survive the night. It was hard to get through a week in Omega without hearing a distant echo of the telltale distant crash and bang of another cut-price aircar losing power a hundred metres above the ground, and that wasn't counting the ones people shot down for fun.

Erash picked idly at the plas-fibre upholstery between his bare legs with a fingernail, instantly breaking through the surface and into the soft yellow filling beneath. He sighed and looked up, catching the eye of Mierin, who was sitting facing him. He offered a sardonic smile to which Mierin completely failed to respond.

"Well," he said into the silence, "this is a nice ride. I see the STG are really going all out on expenses. What next, access to the hotel minibar?"

Nobody replied.

Erash grunted in annoyance. "Like that, is it? Fine. I don't care. But you owe me an explanation, Achav. I want to know what the hell's with this guy." He jerked his head towards the krogan sitting next to him, who didn't even look his way.

Achav glared at him in the rear-view mirror. "Ask Mierin."

Erash snorted and jerked his head towards the silent Mierin. "You _do_ know why we call him the Wall, right?"

"I can speak for myself," Krul said. "Mierin and I are old friends. We work together."

"How nice for you," Erash said acidly. "Doing what?"

The krogan didn't show any sign of acknowledging the naked bile in Erash's voice. "Hunting bounties. Criminals from across the galaxy come to Omega when they have nowhere left to run. We send them back. Dead, if we have to. It's good work. There's no shortage of demand, and we're helping make the galaxy a better place."

"And so you told him about Firebreak," Erash said to Mierin, folding his arms across his chest. He instantly regretted it; his rib was only cracked a little, but touching it still sent tight, hot pain shivering through him.

"Yes," Mierin said.

"Goddess," Erash muttered, and rested his head in his hands. "It was supposed to be secret. It was supposed to be kept to the STG, damn it! You told a _krogan!_"

"I'm not a krogan," Krul said. Erash stared at him for fully five seconds, but there was no hint of anything but sincerity on the krogan's broad face.

"Oh, well, that's all right, then," Erash said, injecting every iota of sarcasm he could muster into his tone, and turned away. _How the hell did the Wall find this guy? Asocial and delusional. What a combination. They make a good pair._

The rest of the journey passed in silence. Erash watched the city flow past the window of the aircar, a brilliant sea of orange lights which took away all sense of direction or location, though he recognised some of the buildings: one, a huge block of a starscraper hanging precariously from the rock above, gave him some idea of where they were, and by the time the aircar was winding between huge, confusing complexes of buildings that jutted aimlessly upwards and outwards he'd got his bearings properly.

"Gozu," he said. "Right?"

"Right," Achav said tersely.

_Suns territory. Interesting. And, of course, it's right next to the Archangel base. It can't be more than twenty minutes' walk from here._

The aircar came humming around another huge, shapeless complex, peeling off from the main traffic lines, and went diving into a maze of flickering lights and crowded metal gantries, ducking under bridges and through old maintenance areas until they came to a makeshift parking lot for eight or nine cars. Achav brought the machine down with a sputtering thud and immediately sprang the doors, getting out without a word.

Erash followed, only to see Achav rummaging in the open trunk for something. He started to ask what he was doing, but Achav cut him off by thrusting something into his face. Closer inspection revealed it was an old blue jumpsuit with the numerals **13** emblazoned in fading yellow across the back. By the looks of it, it was one of the old suits assigned to low-level STG techies, though the design was several generations old.

_What old vault did he drag this out of? Well, it looks like an antique, but it's better than nothing._

He struggled into it and the black boots which came with it, glad for any covering. The boots were too small and the suit baggy and low-quality, but he had to admit it was better than the underwear. His own basic skintight comms unit had survived the explosion – _or else I've somehow learned whatever language the krogan speak in a hurry –_ but there was a reasonably high-end omnitool along with it, and he powered it up with a quiet beep.

Once he was done, Achav tossed him a pistol. Erash caught it by the barrel and examined it briefly; it was an in-house STG gun. _Pelenin R5, powerful but slow-firing. Make your shots count; precise and devastating; meant to be symbolic of the STG's methods. Looks to me like the STG still has its head up its own ass. Who knew?_

At least now that he had clothes and a gun he didn't feel quite so naked, but there was still an empty feeling around his waist where his belt had once been. It was going to take him weeks to synthesise everything he needed, and until then he was going to have to make do with the pathetic power of regular grenades, a thought which soured his mood still further.

His rib was still gnawing incessantly at him as they made their way through Gozu District at a brisk pace, and he was always lagging slightly behind. It was early enough on the station's standard time cycle that not many people were out, though there were a few Blue Suns patrols walking the streets. From what he remembered, Gozu was generally pretty orderly; that was something you could say for the Suns, at least. _Eclipse don't care and the Pack will just make things worse, but the Blue Suns at least limit the crime to what they do. Can't say they're much different to any real government there._

Blazing, garish advertisements in a dozen languages blasted cheerfully away on either side as they left the open section of the district and entered the huge metal complex which provided most of the district's substance; like most places on Omega, its roots were in industry and mining, but hundreds of years had seen the place grow more and more, creating a warren of narrow, dark corridors and apartment sections which almost bent back over themselves.

They were going further and further down through the lower levels, down into the depths below normal street level on Omega. There were more and more Blue Suns, most of them not in their distinctive uniforms but still easily recognisable by the tattoos visible over their collars, the most popular place for the mark. A few batarians hanging around in the doorway of a long-abandoned shop watched them suspiciously as Achav led them down through the bare, shadowy arcade, and Erash studiously didn't make eye contact. With batarians, that was always bad. _I wonder how we look to them? Three salarians, two in high-class military gear and one in a beat-up old jumpsuit, and a krogan... say one thing for Omega, say it's cosmopolitan. Not that that's always a good thing._

He glanced at Krul's back, grimacing. _He shouldn't be here. __**I**__ shouldn't be here, but at least I was STG. He's the enemy. Of all the people in the galaxy the Wall could have opened up to, he chose a damn krogan! If Firebreak gets out, there's no telling what the krogan will do. The political considerations alone-_

He forced himself to break off, cursing inside his head. He'd always despised the political aspects of STG operations. They were just so pointless; he'd never given a damn about anything on that level. _Not that my family matters enough for anyone to care what I think. _He seemed to have been alone there; the team had had an infuriating habit of trying to draw him into ethical discussions whether he wanted to talk or not and, worse still, that was all they ever seemed to discuss.

_Of course, that was always the difference, wasn't it? They weren't real people. They were obsessives. Achav, look at him. He's so focused he could burn holes in a helmet, but if you try to talk to him about anything non-military, he'll shut you down with a look. Mierin was even worse. Never even managed to talk to the bastard. And they still weren't the worst of them._

They passed a huge, heavy-set krogan (_aren't they all?_) lumbering past them in one tight corridor, forcing them to press themselves almost flat against the wall. It ignored them. Erash threw a glance after it as they went on, remembering the vast shadow of the black-clad krogan who'd come so close to killing him less than half an hour earlier. He was told that salarians processed and recovered from strong emotion much more quickly than other races, but that didn't stop him from recalling the cold, numbing fear which had weighed him down and stuck him to the spot with perfect clarity. _Cloaking, the krogan said. Even for the STG, that's high-tech. Who the hell are we dealing with here?_

They pressed on in silence, boots clanging against the floor, and soon they came to a flight of stairs heading still further down. At the bottom, a glowing orange sign announced the presence of a clinic, complete with a symbol which slowly cycled through each different culture's version of the sign: the salarian ring, the human cross, the turian four-pointed star, the batarian rounded square, the asari linked circles, the volus triple-curve, the elcor inverted triangle – even the hanar split circle, though there was nothing for either vorcha nor krogan. _Mostly because they haven't even developed that symbol._

They trooped down as the sign restarted its cycle and turned a couple of corners, following the signs until they emerged into a simple, open area. A heavy-duty rotary door was at the back, and to the left a human guard watched them cautiously from behind scarred, pockmarked bulletproof glass. To the right, four ominous turrets which looked like they'd been ripped straight out of heavy mechs hung lifelessly from the ceiling, although Erash sensed that they would spring to life in a heartbeat if they were needed.

"Business?" the guard said, fingering a heavy shotgun on the counter next to him. His voice was slightly distorted over the intercom.

"Here to see the doctor," Achav said. "Tell him Achav wants to see him."

Before the guard could even do anything, the door into the clinic whirred open. The guard looked over in surprise, then turned back to Achav. "Looks like he wants to see you too. No funny business, though, you got it?"

Achav grunted in acknowledgement and moved on.

The clinic was surprisingly large, a series of rooms linked to one central area which might once have been a sprawling apartment or some kind of social club. The receptionist inside the door waved them through, eyeing their weapons but saying nothing. The first thing Erash noticed were the LOKI mechs standing impassively against every wall, six of them by his count; the clinic was one of the most secure places he'd seen in the entire station.

There were a few people waiting around on low couches and chairs, but none seemed badly injured or sick. The worst of them was a worried-looking turian with his arm around a pale, shivering human woman wrapped in a blanket. By the looks of it, the clinic was as quiet as the rest of the district at that point in the standard cycle.

Achav glanced at a sign on the wall and walked briskly onwards through a corridor opening onto the reception. Two more LOKIs stood guard at the end, submachine guns in their metallic hands. From what Erash had seen so far, the krogan who'd attacked him was going to have a hard time getting past any of the defences, although he'd personally obliterated enough LOKIs in his time to know they wouldn't be much help against a titan like that.

As they approached the corner at the end, a horribly familiar voice came floating out, speaking almost too quickly to understand.

"-inform them suitable prophylactics easily available. Should not have to say, but will anyway: 'love' insufficient to prevent anaphylactic shock. Fundamental protein structure simply incompatible!"

"Uh, yes, Professor. I'll- I'll just tell them that, shall I?" The second voice was human; Erash didn't recognise it. Whoever it was sounded rather embarrassed.

"Yes. Also: recommend watching instructive videos. Extranet full of them. Hard to miss. Reminder: update local 'net filters. Fornax adverts becoming a nuisance."

"Yes, Professor," the human said, and rounded the corner with a datapad in his hands. He stopped in his tracks at the sight of them, looking hunted.

"Professor!" he called, looking back towards the room he'd emerged from. "Your friends are here!"

_Friends, huh?_

"Send them in," the first voice replied instantly.

"I- well, you heard him," the human said, and went bustling past them back towards the waiting room.

The lab they emerged into was a large, well-equipped room. Terminals glowed blue and orange on no less than a dozen separate points, each seeming to do something different; one was affixed to a huge white scanning device in the middle of the room, while others operated what looked to be self-contained biogenesis stations or portable dermal regenerators. Cabinets of thousands upon thousands of colourful vials lined one wall, and on the opposite side of the room shelves of old-style paper books and binders towered to the ceiling. Erash also counted at least ten datapads and discarded omnitools lying on work surfaces all across the room, while at the back a sprawling desk groaned under the weight of chaotic piles of intermixed books, computers, arcane pieces of medical technology and weapons. Crates of what must have been medical suplies hung from the walls in black netting, and all of it was brightly illuminated by clinical fluorescent lights overhead.

The doctor himself was standing over a spotless operating table in a high-collared white labcoat, keying something into an omnitool at impossible speed. He glanced up once, briefly, flicking dark eyes over them and immediately turning his attention back to the tool. His rusty skin glimmered in the omnitool's glow, casting the white scars trailing across one side of his face into sharp relief.

"Achav, Mierin, Erash," he said. Belatedly, Erash realised that that was his way of greeting them. "Plus one. No serious injuries evident – one lightly damaged ribcage, evidently manageable, doesn't count. Must be different reason for being here. Social visit? Hardly likely. Erash wouldn't be here."

"You've got that right," Erash muttered. _At least he's not calling me Yisma. Then again, he never did in the first place._

"Nor the krogan, in fact." He still hadn't looked up from his omnitool. "Can only be related to-"

He pulled the conversation equivalent of an emergency brake and stopped typing, looking up at Krul with an expression of rapt fascination. "No. Yes! No? Surely. Facial structure too similar, colouration of carapace identical. Grundan Krul."

There was a pause.

"You know me?" Krul said warily.

"Not directly. Specialised in krogan-salarian relations for STG. Largely characterisable as 'hostile'; irrelevant. Recall case two hundred years ago. STG mission to Rosgom; retrieval of captured operative. Disastrous. Loss of three agents, entire krogan clan dead. Small clan; forty adults. One child, less than a year old. Only survivor. Taken offworld by strike team in defiance of orders. Adopted by Husius family. Enormous diplomatic row. Krogan demanded child's return. Were refused; Union in no mood to compromise, claimed child would be better off brought up by salarians. Largely forgotten now; generations ago."

Krul shook his great head. "Not for me."

"Wait, wait, hang on," Erash said, turning from Krul to the doctor and back with his hands held up. "You were- that's why you said you weren't a krogan, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Remarkable," the doctor said, with a new sparkle in his eyes. He started pacing around the room, one hand on his chin."Complete cross-species identity absorption, from such a rare combination! Must conduct follow-up study, examine full psychological effects-"

"Mordin," Achav broke in, silencing him. "We're not here for that. There's a krogan out there hunting all the veterans of Firebreak. You're next."

For a split-second, Solus almost seemed at a loss for words, which was definitely a first. Erash could see surprise there for a moment, and then the wheels started turning behind those constantly shifting eyes. Solus recovered and started pacing again, this time still faster.

"Obviously true, wouldn't be here otherwise. Entire ex-Firebreak contingent on Omega in this room. Clinic is secure; no immediate threat. Good. Time to think. First: how? Firebreak top-secret. No loose ends."

"You think?" Erash said acidly, and jerked his head towards Krul. "Mr. Trans-species here knows."

That gave Solus pause for thought, and he turned sharply on his heel, heading for Krul. The krogan stood impassively, eyeing Solus with faint suspicion as he came to a stop before him.

"In that case, must ask: opinion on Firebreak?"

Krul stayed silent for a long few seconds, then grunted: "Necessary."

"Well, there's a first," Erash said, raising an eyebrow. "A krogan who approves of maintaining the genophage. What next, a vorcha who believes in peace and love?"

Solus ignored him entirely, still fixated on Krul. "Necessary for what?"

The krogan shrugged. "Making a better galaxy. That's all you've got, in the end. The krogan make the galaxy worse. The genophage shouldn't have stabilised the population. It should have eliminated it. Firebreak was a step in the right direction, but you did not go far enough. Extinguishing the krogan race is morally necessary."

Erash shook his head in disbelief. "You're one of them, you know."

"My DNA is krogan," Krul said, without a hint of malice, "but I am not."

"So we've got the krogan who thinks he's a salarian, the guy who won't talk, the guy who won't _stop_ talking, and Commander Obsessive here," Erash said disconsolately. "Great. We've got a real fucking crack team here."

"I saved your life, Yisma," Achav snapped. Erash noted the slight emphasis on his first name with displeasure. _Trying to get a rise out of me? That's low, even for you. _"Do not make me regret it."

Erash bristled. "Saved my life? You were the one who put in danger in the first place, asshole! You could have called and warned me, but you used me as bait for that _thing_! You don't care what happens to me, you just want to kill it!"

"The longer it's alive, the more of our people are in danger," Achav said, in the low, brittle tone of someone barely controlling their fury. "You know that! It's not all about you!"

"Oh, so now it's the fucking 'big picture' lecture again, is it?" Erash threw up his arms. "That's all you have? That's all you've _ever_ had! You've spent all your life in the STG because you don't have anything else but your precious fucking 'big picture'!"

Achav's composure evaporated. "Hishau!" he screamed, and suddenly his face, creased with rage, was just centimetres away, his breath warm and flecks of his spittle wet on Erash's face. "Nivion! Rasnus! Hilarom! Cuiron! _Jolin! _They're all _dead_, you understand? Dead, and that fucking krogan _will_ kill again if we don't stop it! You knew them all! We were brothers! Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"Brothers?" Erash shouted back. "The STG was a job, nothing more!"

Overhead, his horns were locked with Achav's now, like a couple of prehistoric cavemen fighting over food. Achav's eyes were bulging with anger, his face contorted and strained. "It was more than that! We were protecting the galaxy! We mattered!"

"And if we hadn't been there, what would have changed? Nothing!"

"What do _you_ do that matters, then?" Achav snarled. "Can you name even one thing?"

"Archangel," Erash very nearly said, but he caught himself in time. _No. No matter what, Archangel stays out of this. Some secrets have to be kept. _Instead, he just pulled away, shaking his head. It hurt to see the triumph on Achav's face, but he'd rather have that than jeopardise Archangel. _And there's more meaning there than what we ever did, Achav. We did a job that others could have done just as well if they'd had the chance. Archangel is unique._

"I thought so," Achav said, with bitter satisfaction.

Erash stepped back, breathing heavily, and raised his hands. _Control yourself. _He forced himself to mentally slow down, crushing the anger away into a side pocket of his mind as much as he could. Surprisingly, it worked; his head cleared, and vague embarrassment replaced it. "Fuck it. I don't care. This is all we have. Let's just kill this son of a bitch and be done with it, then maybe I'll never have to say anything to any of you ever again."

"Antagonism useless – no, harmful," Solus said, in that self-righteous little voice he reserved for when he wanted to look superior to everyone else. _Which is pretty much all the time. Smug bastard. _"Enemy evidently lethal. Teamwork vital."

"Teamwork," Erash muttered, shaking his head. "Coming from the asshole who poisoned me."

Solus cocked his head. "Poison? Had no way of knowing about hylemerol allergy. Should have been reported on official papers. Your fault."

"My fault?" Erash said, outraged. "Like hell! You were the one experimenting on me!"

"Unusual blood chemistry presented excellent opportunity for research-"

"I don't even want to know how you know about my blood chemistry," Erash said. "You know what, forget it. I forgive you."

"Unlikely," Solus said.

* * *

It took a few minutes for Achav to get Solus up to speed on the gritty details of the situation. Erash amused himself by wandering around and examining various mysterious implements around the lab, but what caught his eye in particular was the crate of grenades he found hidden away in a corner. He opened it up eagerly and found its soft black interior full of strange, smooth transparent globes full of some kind of viscous yellow liquid. They didn't look like anything he'd ever seen before.

"Solus," he said, holding one up. "What the hell kind of explosive is this?"

Solus threw him a brief glance, then looked away. "Technically not explosive."

Erash frowned and looked closer. "Then what is it?"

"Krogan semen. Useful genetic samples. Please do not break."

"Uh. That's definitely not going to happen," Erash said, and very carefully placed the globe back into its cushioned hollow. _Should have known it would be something like that. Is it so much to ask for just a pinch of lagactica felgercarbonate or taviscium grootae?_

"STG are aware of situation?" Solus asked Achav.

"Yes," Achav said, "but they've only believed me since yesterday. Last communication I had said they'd have a team out here within four days."

"Four days?" Erash said incredulously, and let the case slam shut. Solus winced. "There's a krogan out there who knows about Firebreak and who's murdering ex-STG men and that's the best they can do?"

"As far as they're concerned, I've gone rogue," Achav said wearily. "I've been ignoring orders to return to Union space for a month. It took Rasnus dying for them to take me seriously. They still don't believe he knows about Firebreak, somehow. They think he's the tool of someone bigger."

"Isn't he?" Krul said thoughtfully. "That cloaking tech has serious creds behind it."

"He knows, though," Achav said. "You heard him. It doesn't make a difference whether we've got the back up, though, and with the bandwidth lag on Omega, we're not getting in contact any time soon. We bring him down. Nobody else. Us. This is our business."

Erash snorted and sat on the edge of the operating table, ignoring Solus's irritated glance. "If he's got any sense, he'll leave the station. We're safe here, and attacking is suicide."

Achav shook his head. "He won't leave the station. This isn't logical. It's an obsessive crusade. He wouldn't be able to tear himself away."

"Probable," Solus said, "but problematic. Unlikely to attack us together. Must be baited."

"Oh, yeah, let's split up and search for clues," Erash said, waving a hand. "What's the worst that could happen?"

"Death," Mierin said. Erash glanced his way, but the Wall's stony blue face gave nothing away. _That was either extremely good sarcasm or completely serious, and I really can't tell which. And I thought Melenis was bad about this. Do I know anyone who doesn't have some kind of ridiculously idiosyncratic speech pattern?_

"We can't trace him," Achav said, drumming his fingers on the side of his gun. "We have no way of finding him. He has to come to us."

"Don't say it," Erash warned.

Achav shot him a disparaging glance. "It may be necessary to-"

"Here it comes," Erash said dolefully.

"-split up."

Erash blew out his cheeks and hung his head. "I fucking knew it."


	41. Leviathan: Hunted

**LEVIATHAN**

**THREE: HUNTED**

* * *

"I refuse to believe this is the best plan we have," Erash muttered. "This is ridiculous."

Over the comm link, Achav's voice hung heavy with annoyance. "We've been over this a dozen times. We've got nothing better."

Erash muttered something obscene under his breath as he cut the comm channel and stared moodily ahead at Krul's broad, armoured back. The two of them were the only ones together; Achav, Mierin and Solus were all on their own somewhere within a few blocks' radius of him, and Erash had a feeling that he knew why. _He won't be going after Krul. He's not meant to be here. And me... well, I'm not exactly well-armed here, and I can't get my hands on anything at the moment. If that krogan comes after me alone, my ass gets pasted across the station before I can say 'genophage'. So here we are. The outcasts. The krogan who wants to be a salarian and the salarian who doesn't particularly care for them._

They were traipsing through one of the lower districts of Omega, though Erash had no idea where they were in relation to Gozu and Kima. They'd left Solus's lab more than an hour ago and split up, leaving Erash and Krul wandering through winding streets and back alleys, waiting for the black-armoured krogan to show himself. _Except he's not going to. He'll be off station by now. High passage, low passage, any way... he's out of here._

It was still early morning on the standard cycle, but the station was starting to come to life. The streets weren't packed, but there were more people there than before, usually alone and bleary-eyed. The sharp stink of a bustling human coffee house advertised by a pink neon sign depicting a glowing cup wafted out towards them, and Erash wrinkled his nose. Working for Sensat had been better than anything he'd tried before, but the four-eyed bastard had forced him to make the acrid black drink every day. _That I definitely don't miss._

At least his rib wasn't bothering him any more; Solus had injected some medigel onto the fracture before they'd left, and Erash could feel a patch of dull numbness there as his bone slowly knitted itself back together. It'd be fine inside a day, apparently, although he didn't appreciate the fact that Solus had got him with the injector without actually telling him what he was going to do beforehand.

The lights overhead were still as inconsistent as ever, resulting in Omega's characteristic orange twilight, but as they passed a scratched window of toughened duraplas, Erash saw the beginnings of the morning rush hour in the sky, written in the glowing lights of the increasing number of skycars humming through Omega's airless open spaces. As he watched, he caught sight of the dark, blocky shape of a freighter slowly pulling away from the distant spaceport, its engines glowing red behind it. _Ten to one the krogan's on board, and this is all a waste of time._

Still, he couldn't help but jump at shadows. Every alley seemed to hold a huge, eight-foot dark shape ready to leap out and disembowel him with biotics – _although maybe that's just Ripper. Haven't seen him in a week, but then again... things have been a little sketchy of late, since he turned up. Since Harga._

He'd put the memory behind him, or at least he thought he had. He could remember the screaming and shouting and pleading all well enough, but what stuck in his mind more than anything was the quiet tinkling sound the pieces of Garrus's shattered visor had made when they'd fallen to the ground – and the heavy _crunch_ as he repaid the favour to Butler. _One big happy family, that's us. Then again, compared to what I put up with with these head-up-their-own-cloaca bastards, that's a damn holiday._

Krul hadn't so much as looked at him since they'd left Solus's clinic, and Erash was fine with that. He'd spent enough time on Omega to know how to navigate it: keep your eyes on your feet and don't look at anyone, especially not krogans or batarians. _Too many eyes, and they aren't exactly understanding if you look at the wrong ones. _Nobody in their right minds would mess with Krul when they saw the cartoonishly oversized shotgun slung over his shoulder, and as long as Erash stayed behind him, he was reasonably confident that nobody would bother them. That didn't stop unpleasant memories of that immense black shape rising from the flames from bubbling up at the back of his mind, and when he looked at Krul, they became stronger still.

A short clatter of automatic weapon fire up ahead made him start and look up, but nobody seemed to be paying it much attention. As they rounded a corner and emerged through a shimmering mass effect-sealed soft air-curtain into a more open part of the station, with starscrapers and distant rock looming overhead, he saw why; a couple of vorcha lay dead on the side of the road as a turian he vaguely recognised reloaded an assault rifle. _One of T'Loak's enforcers. Gamon? Something like that. Good to see someone's cleaning the filth out of this place apart from Archangel._

"A job well done," Krul said to him as they passed, Erash stepping carefully over the yellowish blood pooling on the metal while the krogan walked straight through it.

The turian nodded amiably and poked one of the rapidly-draining corpses with a foot. "The scum shouldn't be in this part of town," he said, shrugging. "Or any part, for that matter."

"Agreed," Krul rumbled, and then they were past and moving on along the elevated walkway. Erash threw a glance over his shoulder as the turian reached down with a look of distaste and started dragging one of the vorcha away, then hurried up until he was walking alongside Krul.

"And here I thought the krogan and vorcha were BFFs," he said.

"Perhaps," Krul said, without looking down at him. "But I am no krogan."

Erash rolled his eyes. "See, now, I've heard about transspeciesism. It's one of those weird extranet things, where they get whole chatrooms full of male humans who're convinced they're asari born on the wrong planet – or there was that one batarian those human diplomats raised who, surprise surprise, turned informant for the Hegemony. That's a good case study right there, actually. Born batarian, raised human. It didn't do him any good. A batarian is a batarian. A salarian is a salarian. A krogan is _definitely _a krogan."

"You don't know me," Krul said distantly. "Why do you think you can tell me who I am?"

"Because you're a seven-foot, half-ton, scaly son of a bitch?" Erash offered. "And of all the species in this galaxy who might think they're something they're not, the krogan aren't the ones who it'd stick for. I mean, it's, biological fact. You can't just hollow someone out and then fill the gap with whatever you like."

Krul grunted in what might have been annoyance. "I never said I was a salarian. I just said I wasn't a krogan."

Erash squinted suspiciously at him. They'd turned another corner, away from the busy walkways and into narrower, more sparsely-peopled streets where they'd make a better target for any hunter. Shadows grew deeper, doorways more cavernous, alleys more ominous.

"So, if you're not a krogan and you're not a salarian, what are you? Wait, don't tell me. Quarian? Elcor? Raloi?"

Finally, Krul looked at him, sweeping restrained, watchful amber eyes over him like searchlights. "Before I answer, tell me this: what is a krogan? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions to be one?"

Erash had to take a few seconds before replying. "Biology. That's it."

Krul nodded. "So, take a thought experiment. The consciousness of another species inhabits the body of a krogan. You saw _One Day In Paradise_?"

"Is that porn?" Erash asked. "Because it sounds like porn."

Krul snorted in amusement. _So, there __**is**__ a person under there somewhere. I know too many people who might as well be robots for all the personality they show you. _"No. A salarian nobleman expecting his first son to be born tomorrow wakes up in the body of a krogan in a dying clan on Tuchanka, and vice versa. It's a comedy, and of course in the end they learn a valuable lesson about tolerance. It's terrible, but that's not the point. The salarian in the krogan's body acted like a salarian, thought he was a salarian, even spoke a salarian language through krogan lips. What does that make him?"

"A salarian, obviously," Erash said, but even he could see where the flaw in his argument was. _Stupid, stupid. Letting a krogan get past you so easily? What are you doing?_

"Yet he was biologically krogan," Krul said. "Therefore, by your argument, he is krogan. Do you believe in souls?"

_Well, I set myself up for that one. _"No."

"Then your argument makes no sense. A krogan is more than a pile of DNA, just as a salarian is. What made the salarian a salarian even in the krogan's body? How was he different?"

Coming from anyone else, it would have sounded as condescending as all hell, but somehow the krogan's deep, measured voice came across as simply inquisitive.

"It was all in the mind, I guess," Erash said, "and in the thought patterns and behaviour – but that's a product of biology all the same. A salarian acts like a salarian because evolution made him act like a salarian. Get me?"

"A better argument," Krul said, as they turned another corner and headed into still more narrow, winding streets, sided by towering, crumbling duracrete apartment blocks, "but nurture is not completely irrelevant. Is it?"

"No," Erash conceded. "Fair enough. So a krogan is someone who acts like a krogan, thinks like a krogan, thinks he _is_ a krogan- ah."

Krul nodded as Erash realised he'd argued himself into a corner. "So you see. Do I act like a krogan?"

Erash hissed between his teeth. "All right, no."

"Do I think like a krogan?"

"Doesn't seem like it."

"And, although you can't verify it, I don't think I'm a krogan," Krul finished. "Body is body, mind is mind. I may have the body of a krogan, but I'm more than a krogan in here." One thick, armoured finger tapped against his purplish carapace with a _thunk. _"More, and better."

_Now who's the racist?_

"All right, then," Erash said, swallowing his pride. He nearly choked on it. "Fine. You're not a krogan. What are you?"

"I'm not a part of any label," Krul said. "I'm not a krogan, or a salarian, or anything else like that. I'm just me."

"You kept your krogan name," Erash pointed out.

"For a time, I had a salarian name," Krul said, slightly hesistantly. _Interesting. _"The family who adopted me – the Husius family – they gave me a name. For about thirty years, I was called Kolder Husius."

"Why'd you give it up, then?" Erash asked. "Why go back to the krogan name if you're not one of them? Why not make up your own name or something? You could have come up with something awesome."

"I was the very last of clan Grundan in all the galaxy, as far as I knew," Krul said. "Why not take back the name I was born with? It was nobody else's name any more. It was mine."

Erash chewed a lip thoughtfully. He'd almost completely forgotten about the krogan which could have been lying in wait in any alley or on any rooftop. "Why change it in the first place, though?"

Krul paused for a moment before answering, and when he spoke, his voice was more distant than ever. "Because I was never Kolder Husius. I lived in Union space for all my early years, but you can imagine the response to a krogan child brought up as a salarian. What did you see when you first looked at me? How did you react?" Before Erash could answer – and to his relief – Krul went on. "You saw a krogan. Most krogan are brutes. Sentient, sapient, yes, but dull, barbaric, vicious. There are some exceptions, but all in all the krogan race is a blight on the galaxy. As I said, the genophage was the perfect mechanism to get rid of them entirely. It's not genocide; it's just escorting the krogan to a dignified, harmless end. Most salarians think like I do, and like you do. Were you ever bullied?"

Erash glanced away for a moment. "Uh. Not exactly. I was one of them. You know that one kid, the one who's not all that tough but still hangs around with the big ones because he can do their homework and because he knows where to score value-bags of shitty batarian firecrackers?"

"That sounds too specific to be a stereotype," Krul said, with a slight smile on his face. "Those things are dangerous, you know."

Erash held up his right hand and pointed to a faint, pale scar on the greenish skin which ran all the way around the third finger, about an inch from the top. "Yeah. I know."

Krul let out a deep chuckle. "Wow. That must have hurt."

"Well, yeah," Erash said, shrugging, "but you would not believe how cool being the kid who blew off the tip of his finger makes you in school. Totally worth it. And I made a career out of doing the same to other people, only on a bigger scale."

"Win-win, I suppose," Krul said, shaking his head. "Well, I would have been one of the ones you picked on. I don't blame them. If I'd been in their place, I'd likely have done the same thing. I had a few close friends, and that was it. Most of them wouldn't come near me. Every salarian parent tells their kids bedtime stories about the krogan monsters who tried to destroy the galaxy. Even mine. Why would anyone want to talk to me? Do you know how many krogan there were on Sur'kesh, where I grew up?"

"Go on, then," Erash said. "Tell me."

"Of a population of just over a billion, there were about five hundred. I never saw one of them. I don't think any of them even lived in Gamayne, and it was the third-biggest city on the planet. For all intents and purposes, I was alone. Worse, salarian biology is so much faster than what I had. I had to sleep eight hours at the very least, while everyone else got by on one. They all matured so much faster than me, until the few friends I had were adults when I was still an adolescent. Some of them went offworld. Some of them just stopped talking to me. The new generation came in, and they passed me too. I finished school and university, in the end, and by the time I'd graduated, years behind everyone else... the two friends I still had were so old. My parents had died before I was out of school. By the time I was forty, barely into adulthood by krogan standards, everyone I knew was dead. Old age. Old age!" He shook his head again, and grunted under his breath. "Forty years. That's all you have. Incredible. I've lived five times that and more, and I'm young."

Erash said nothing. He was trying and failing to imagine living for two hundred years. It seemed impossible; there'd be so much stuffed into them that he doubted he'd be able to remember a moment of it.

"You can guess what happened next," Krul went on. He was speaking more or less completely flatly, as if there was no emotional meaning behind the story, but there was a strange, faraway look in those yellow eyes. "I was an only child of a minor branch of the family, and of course the main branch wanted nothing to do with me. Understandable. My sheer existence was a threat to their breeding treaties. I probably cost them millions. The generation which had taken me in was long gone, and their grandchildren wanted me gone. I didn't want to stay. There was nothing for me there. They couldn't force me to lose my name, but they asked me – politely, and formally – to drop every aspect of my identity on Sur'kesh and to leave the planet. I did. What else would I do? What else could I say?"

For the first time in ten minutes or so, Erash actually looked around. They were still in the run-down lower districts, but over the rooftops he could see spiralling clouds of smoke and vented atmosphere which told him they were near the border of the sprawling mining and industrial districts whose vast size was the only reason Omega was even slightly economically viable. _Wow. Lost track of time there. Just how far have we come?_

"That's why I'm not Kolder Husius," Krul said, after a few seconds' pause. "I agree with them. It's not my name."

"I see," Erash said, then immediately mentally berated himself for coming up with such a weak response. _But it's like he said. What is there to say?_

"Not many people know that story," Krul said slowly. "At least, I haven't told it to many. Not for years."

"So why me?" Erash asked. "Who else has heard it?"

Krul looked away for a moment. "Old friends. Most of them were salarians, for one reason or another. I'm not one of you, but you're just about the only people in the galaxy I feel any kind of kinship with. I never learn. They're all dead now. I worked with partners until about a century ago, but sooner or later, I just stopped. You die so easily. There were... six? Seven? I can't even remember."

"What about the Wall?"

"Mierin is... unique," Krul said, after a moment. "Nobody would deny that. We met years ago, chasing the same bounty. It's not much of a story, really, but in the end, my shotgun saved his life, and his barriers saved mine. We worked well together despite just having met, so we made that a permanent arrangement. I only did it because he was so cold, so aloof. Because he was the Wall."

"Can't deny that," Erash muttered. "Never thought the grim bastard would work with anyone he wasn't forced to work with, though."

"I definitely wasn't expecting us to become friends," Krul agreed. "In fact, I was hoping we wouldn't. That way, all I'd lose when he died was a professional partner. I've lost too many friends over the years."

_Who hasn't?_

"So you told him," Erash said slowly, "and then...?"

"Yes," Krul said. "He told me. About Firebreak, about his past in the STG, about everything."

Erash shook his head wearily. "He knew that was classified. He knew what leaking it could do. Why? Of all people, why him?"

Krul stared into the distance for a while, then made a thoughtful rumbling sound in the back of his throat. "I don't understand him either, but I think he's very... simple. Maybe that's the wrong word. He's intelligent, of course, much more than me, but I think he doesn't do a single thing unless he has a compelling reason. That's why he told me, I think. He felt he had to, because I'd told him what I just told you. He must have known that I would approve."

They came upon a body lying across the narrow street, a vorcha with a rifle-chewed torso and what looked awfully like a vorcha-chewed neck, though there was nobody else around. Erash grimaced and carefully stepped over the corpse, but Krul stopped to pick it up.

Erash watched rivulets of dead blood trickle down the back of Krul's armour as he slung the body over his shoulder with distaste. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Cleaning up," Krul grunted, and strode on. Erash hurried to keep up. Within a minute they came to a balcony over an opening in the walkway filled by a rising pillar of what looked like toxic smoke; it boiled up through the floor and then through a similar hole cut in the ceiling, the classic Omega solution to dealing with dangerous gaseous byproducts of the factories churning away in the bowels of the station. They passed nobody on the way, which was good; this being Omega, nobody would have cared that they were carrying a murdered body around, but it would have drawn unwanted attention.

Krul dropped the body through the hole, sending ripples through the smoke for a moment, then walked on.

"Someone's gonna have to clean that off a factory roof, you know," Erash said.

"It'll be nothing but bones before then," Krul replied, "and the station is a little bit better in the meantime."

Erash stared at him for a second, then shrugged. "Fair enough. Goddess knows the vorcha are everywhere these days. A couple of years ago, I'd never even heard of them. These days, it seems like I kill nothing but."

Krul grunted in agreement and ambled on. "What do you do? Security work?"

"Uh, yeah," Erash said, silently cursing himself for forgetting he was supposed to be keeping Archangel a secret. _I don't normally talk to anyone who's not a part of it, that's the problem. _"Something like that, anyway."

"I worked sec for a while a few decades back," Krul said, "but it's not my thing. No independence. Bounty hunting lets you set your own hours, and you don't have to take any job you don't like. I quit sec work in the first place because my firm contracted out to the Blood Pack. There's money there, but I could never work for them."

As they turned into another empty street, Erash glanced up at Krul again. "You really don't like krogans, do you?"

"No," Krul said, and an ugly glint flickered at the edge of his eyes. "I don't. I know what they are. I'm no krogan, but my body disagrees. I can't completely shake the urges. The blood lust. The rage. That's all that powers krogan. They're animals with a sheen of sapience. I fight it; I rise above it. Most of them give into their nature, and their nature is what makes them live their lives like they do: they're solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. They could live for centuries or, hell, even millennia. Think what could be done with a life like that! The wisdom and the learning alone... the krogan could match the asari, but they're crippled by their own minds. They burn out and die young. They're a failed race, and the galaxy will be better off if they go extinct. So thank you for working on Firebreak, Erash. I just wish you'd gone further."

"Sometimes," Erash murmured, "so do I."

"And you feel you're a racist for it?" Krul said. "Don't. The krogan _are_ inferior. That's simply fact."

"Yeah, maybe," Erash said, suddenly feeling very uncomfortable. "I doubt the one who's after us agrees, though."

"He's a battlemaster," Krul said. "They're the best of a bad lot. I've met some who've transcended their nature a little, and they're the most dangerous."

Erash prodded at his mending rib, sending a dull spasm of pain shivering through his chest. "You can say that again. He's already killed too many of us."

"No more," Krul grunted. "We'll put an end to this long before those reinforcements get here."

They rounded another corner and emerged onto a less empty street; there were a few people wandering blearily along it, all looking like part of the morning crowd with eyes propped open by stims and stone-set faces which very clearly indicated that they would take having to actually interact with other people like they would a punch in the stomach. Most planets had something like that in one form or another, but more than a few of Omega's many, many murders each year could be put down to pissed-off early-morning workers having to deal with just a little too much shit. _And can you blame them? Goddess knows I wanted to kill __**someone**__ when Achav hauled my ass out of bed today._

They passed them soon enough, cutting through walkways and alleys across the city at random. For the most part, they stayed away from the more populated areas; in twenty minutes, Erash estimated that they saw maybe a hundred people on the streets, if that. None of them paid the strange pairing of a salarian and a krogan the slightest bit of attention. _You see a lot stranger every day on this station, I suppose._

Still, Erash felt less and less uncomfortable next to Krul the longer they walked. It was fair to say that the krogan hadn't been anything like how Erash had expected him to be, and he was beginning to find himself liking him more than he did any of the others. _Which isn't hard. Heads up their own cloacas, the lot of them. At least Krul's not so damn full of himself._

_Huh. Never expected that the first krogan I exchanged more than a few words with would be more interesting than most of the salarians I know. A man can only withstand so much neurosis._

Their route took them past another half-empty, run-down old residential area – _is there any other kind on Omega?_ - and through an old mining tunnel for a couple of hundred metres, replacing the usual drab durasteel with worn, naked rock. Delicate shadows flickered under every tiny flaw and feature in the rock, cast by patchy fluorescent light strips overhead. At the entrance, one hung half-down from the ceiling, buzzing on and off every few seconds.

The tunnel was only wide enough for four or so abreast, although with Krul there that narrowed down to about three. A few batarians, looking like the dregs of some gang or other in armour mottled with flaking green paint, were forced to squeeze past on one side, throwing murderous glances at Krul as they went. For his part, the krogan didn't even seem to notice them. For _his _part, Erash flashed them a smile, knowing that they weren't quite stupid enough to tangle hand-to-hand with a krogan in an enclosed space. He got a couple of muttered curses in a patois too obscure or too obscene for his translator to make anything of, but it was the thought that counted.

The tunnel wound up and around like a coiled snake, eventually depositing them on another walkway after Krul ignored several other exits to greener pastures. This time, they were in an area of the station Erash didn't recognise at all; it was clearly an old industrial district, the broad street sided by megalithic metal factories and refineries, but none of it seemed to be active. There were places like it all over the station, he knew, but he never went near them.

"We can't stop here," he muttered. In an alley away to the side, hints of movement in the shadows caught his eyes and then melted away into the darkness. "This is vorcha country."

"A perfect place for an ambush," Krul said.

Erash chewed his lip, then shook his head. "No. It's too perfect. He'd know we're up to something-"

"Possible sighting," Solus said urgently over a newly-opened comm link. Erash stopped dead in his tracks in surprise, and by the time he'd processed what he'd heard, Solus was speeding on. "Reading nearby cloaking signal. Range thirty to eighty metres. Well-hidden, but unmistakeable. Sending coordinates."

"Confirm," Achav said, as Erash checked the figures which had just flashed up on his wrist computer. "Could it be a false positive?"

"No."

"These coords are in the industrial sectors," Erash said. "Nobody around. It's got to be him." _And now we're going to have to go down there and fight it. Brilliant. _"Sorry, boys!" he called out to the vorcha which must have been concealed all over the place. "Another time, huh?"

"There should be an old industrial elevator nearby," Krul said, consulting his own computer. "This way."

He hurried on ahead at what looked like a steady jog, but it was about as fast as Erash could sprint. He was panting by the time Krul ducked into what looked like another alley, and he was far enough behind that when the krogan started firing, all he saw was the muzzle flash casting ghoulish shadows on the wall. He skidded around the corner as the shotgun boomed again, fumbling for his pistol, just in time to see a vorcha's torso more or less explode outwards, sending foul-smelling yellowish innards splattering across the alley. A few more lay in thick puddles of viscera behind the advancing krogan, and Erash hurdled them as he followed Krul down towards the elevator at the end of what he now realised was an old access point.

There were no more vorcha ahead. They were behind.

Shouts and rasping snarls erupted behind them with the elevator still thirty metres distant, and when Erash threw a glance over his shoulder as he ran he saw the shadows seeming to burst into life, vomiting out dozens of vorcha, teeth bared and mouths slavering. They swarmed down the buildings on either side like hordes of spiders, pouring out of open vents and leaping from twenty-metre rooftops, some of them firing wildly with fifty-cred pistols or even assault rifles. None of the shots came anywhere near him, but they were terrifyingly fast, and they were gaining.

_Must go faster. Must go faster._

"Get the elevator!" he shouted to Krul then, without waiting for an answer, turned and started firing. Still retreating as fast as he could go, he emptied the clip into the onrushing mass. The pistol was powerful enough to rip straight through the vorcha, and he was fairly sure each shot he fired was killing at least two of them, but there were seemingly hundreds now, a red-brown tidal wave of fangs and flashing yellow eyes that his pistol was about as much use against as it would be against a real tsunami.

"Got it!" Krul called, and Erash turned again and ran for his life. The elevator stood open ahead of him, its wide doors looking very, very welcoming – though the sight of Krul, shotgun at the ready, was less inviting. Erash covered the distance in about half a second and almost dived in, and a split-second later there was a hiss and a squelch as the doors slammed vertically shut.

He looked around. Two severed vorcha forearms lay on the floor in a widening pool of blood, one of them still clutching a jagged piece of metal as a knife. The smell was oppressively bad. The doors dripped with more of the stuff, and for the first time in his life Erash found himself silently thanking whichever idiot decided automatic sensor failsafes were an unnecessary expense in an elevator.

Erash giggled semi-hysterically. "Oh, man. Guess he's going to have to take a course in unarmed combat, huh?"

The pun was just about the only one he knew which worked in most languages – _something to do with etymology? _- and Krul let out a quiet rumble of a laugh.

"That's twice I've almost been killed today," Erash said, and slumped to the floor as the elevator began to whir downwards, breathing heavily. "It's not even breakfast. Shit." He reached out with a boot and kicked the nearest arm away a little.

"If Solus is right," Krul said, "prepare for round three."

Erash snorted. "Oh, joy."

The elevator sped on, carrying them further and further down into the smoky bowels of Omega. It was ridiculous, of course, but somehow the shadows already seemed to be reaching up to claim them.


	42. Leviathan: Cornered

**LEVIATHAN**

**FOUR: CORNERED**

* * *

Erash was eager to get out of the elevator by the time it had finished its two-minute journey down into the lowest reaches of Omega. The smell had gone from terrible to nearly unbearable. He had no idea what vorcha biology was like, but from the stink of the severed arms on the floor it seemed that their blood somehow curdled on contact with oxygen.

When the blood-spattered doors finally heaved open, he was out even before he'd had a chance to look around. That meant that the first thing he experienced was a wave of crushing, bone-dry heat.

"Shit," he croaked. "I think I can feel my eyeballs frying."

He'd stepped out into a side passage much like the one which housed the stop they'd got on at, but there were no vorcha down here. Even for them, this was too much. There was a noticeable shimmer in the air, and whenever he breathed in he could feel the heat of the air rushing through his lungs. It had to be fifty, sixty degrees at the very least, maybe higher, and the absolute lack of water in the air made it worse. Within seconds, his throat was dry and leathery, and his tongue felt like it weighed twice as much as normal.

"We should go," Krul said, and strode on ahead. Erash trotted after him, blinking moisture back onto his eyes as fast as he could and mentally cursing the krogan's hardiness. _And Solus, damn him. Why did he come down here? I mean, it obviously worked, but still..._

At the end of the passage, they emerged into a vast, empty loading dock a hundred metres to a side. Once, it might have held scores of containers to be shipped up to the main levels of Omega for off-station transport, but this whole area had been abandoned for going on decades now. Omega was bigger than most gave it credit for; its rough, unverifiable population estimates of six to ten million were a fraction of what the station could have supported if every inch of it had been built up, but down here there was nothing but dried-up eezo mines and a handful of automated factories processing the last scrapes of minerals dug out from the asteroid's shell.

"Signal mobile," Solus said over the line, his voice slightly hushed. "Slow, but can't pin it down."

"Stay on it, Mordin," Achav said sharply. "Don't let the bastard get away from us. Not again."

"No danger of that."

As they spoke, Erash and Krul came to the broad doors set into the opposite side of the dock. Krul found a switch somewhere and set them whirring slowly apart, and as soon as the crack was wide enough for them, they headed through.

The industrial districts had once been some of the biggest producers of eezo in the galaxy, but the station's glory days had been behind it even by the time of Krogan Rebellions. Once, a hundred processing plants had churned out the galaxy's most valuable substance at a tonnage which matched any other asteroid in the galaxy, but now they stood empty, huge dark blocks which towered up to the next level of the station like solid slabs of obsidian. A dozen of them lined one central avenue which once might have been bustling with the old wheeled trucks still in use in most mining operations, but the road was clear.

Erash stepped out into the middle of the avenue and turned a complete circle, examining the huge plants on every side. He couldn't tell them apart. They were all the same monolithic masses of dull durasteel, covered by sprawling nets of pipes and shafts which ferried gases and materials through the district; they went everywhere, spiralling up towards the distant ceiling and snaking across it in huge, sagging masses. They'd been the arteries of the sector once, but these days, they ran empty. The lifeblood had dried up almost completely generations ago.

"It's a wonder there's anyone left on this fucking station," Erash muttered, wiping his brow. The air was a little cooler out in the open, but only in the same way that Krul was a little less formidable than the krogan they were chasing.

"Hasn't that always been true?" Krul said over his shoulder. He'd already started jogging down the broad avenue towards the source of Solus's signal, the heavy clang of his footfalls echoing forlornly off the vast flat surfaces on every side. Erash gritted his teeth and ran after him, sucking down lungfuls of air so hot it almost burned.

"Solus, where the hell are you?" he said, half-under his breath. For his part, Solus didn't respond, though the yellow icon representing him on Erash's wrist-computer still blinked steadily three hundred metres away.

They ran on in silence, which only made their footsteps sound louder still. The lights were dimmer here than in most of the station and seemed to be even more orange-tinted, giving the area an uncanny likeness to sunset on Sur'Kesh; in front of him, behind him and to both sides, long shadows arrowed out, cast by the low, decades-old lights fixed to the enormous silhouettes of the plants. There was a strange ethereal sense to the place, a feel of constrained, hidden menace unlike the usual naked threat Omega's streets posed. Down here, there was nothing. It wasn't a place for people. People were too small, like insects scurrying about beneath crumbling monuments to a long-dead age.

It struck Erash that there was no reason for either side to be down in the scorching pits of Omega unless they thought it would be to their advantage. _We've got him alone with us down here, and he's got us. One of us is cornered. I wonder who?_

"He's inside one of the facilities," Krul called, looking at his omnitool. "That one."

The krogan pointed to one of the looming shapes as they ran, and Erash took it in without enthusiasm. _Great. An abandoned factory. I really, really hope there isn't an old amusement park somewhere around here to go with it._

"Entering now," Achav said, his heavy breathing just about audible over the connection. "Mierin?"

"Soon."

"Still can't track signal," Solus said irritably. "Cloaking tech far too good for krogan. Salarian quality."

"If he's got our names, he might as well have our kit," Erash said, between blazing gasps of air. "Maybe – _hah_ – someone leaked both, or maybe he got a unit off someone's body..."

"Likely the latter," Achav snapped. Erash noted the raw, incandescent flash of barely-controlled rage with discomfort. _Note to self: don't remind him about the dead. He doesn't react well._

Krul and Erash wheeled around through a broad, empty set of gateposts which once might have let three or four big trucks through at once and ran across the barren yard which lay past them. When they got to the doors, Erash glanced at the controls to the side and shook his head.

"We're not getting in this way," he said, holding up a handful of broken, decades-old wires from the mass of them which hung down in front of the control panel. "Side door?"

Krul ignored him, instead staring at the wide doors with a calculating expression in his eye. He reached out and rapped his armoured knuckles on them a couple of times, producing a hollow, echoing clang.

"Yeah, that's solid metal," Erash said, resting his hands on his knees as he got his breath back in hot, desiccated gulps. "You're not getting through-"

Krul continued to ignore him, backed up about five metres and then launched himself at the doors. Erash flinched back as the metal screeched and tore like paper, letting Krul charge through into the darkness beyond.

Erash shrugged, and followed. _Guess he is. And he says he's not a krogan._

Jagged shards of metal reached down at him as he carefully picked his way through the hole Krul had left, and one caught him just behind his left horn. He cursed under his breath and wiped away a trickle of blood from the back of his neck as Krul turned on the light in his omnitool, sending a powerful white beam skittering across the room. Erash did the same.

The room was a loading bay, or something like it. The evidence was there: huge, empty racks which would have held big twelve-metre containers towered up to the high ceiling in one corner, and a couple of empty containers were still sitting against a wall. They reminded Erash of the cramped metal boxes Harga's slavers had kept their captives in. His hands tightened around the grip of his pistol. _What is it with krogan?_

Erash glanced down at his computer again. Solus's signal was some two hundred metres ahead of them, somewhere in the depths of the facility. Mierin was about twice that away off to one side, and Achav was a little closer than that another quarter-circle around. _Which is nice and all, but I could really use a floor plan..._

"Through there," Krul said, illuminating an old durasteel circular door set into one wall with his omnitool's beam. "It goes the right way."

It took a few tries for them to open it; the old circuits were still just about functional, but years of decay had killed half the connectors. Eventually it rolled slowly open with a rasp of grinding metal, revealing a dark, narrow corridor which faded away into blackness. The air was cooler by a few degrees, but still utterly baking – and worse, it was stale even by Omega's standard. Just breathing it in put a sour metallic tang in Erash's mouth.

"Well," he said into the silence, "at least the bastard can't ambush us here."

"Yes," Krul said. "Instead, we'd just be trapped with him. Much better."

Erash grunted and set out down into the shadows of the corridor, his beam illuminating a mess of wires and pipes which ran down both walls and along the ceiling. "Could be worse. Not by much, though."

"Welcome to Omega," Krul replied, and Erash forced out a harsh chuckle, then instantly regretted it as another breath sucked all the moisture from his mouth. The air was still bone-dry, but his skin was slick with sweat and his jumpsuit was already starting to feel damp around him. _At least that won't last long with this heat. I could probably save some money on dry-cleaning by just hauling all my clothes down here for a few minutes._

_Although, come to think of it, right now I don't actually own any clothes_

They came to another door, which chugged open after a couple of seconds.

"Oh, man," Erash said. "This isn't going to end well."

They'd emerged into an incredibly vast area – Erash didn't even feel comfortable calling it a room – which must once have served as the main refinery floor. It was pitch-black, but their flashlights sent pencil-thin beams spearing through the burning air to the distant wall on the other side. By the look of it, Erash estimated that it had to be at least four hundred metres across, maybe more, and the ceiling was at least fifty metres up. As he moved his beam, it illuminated spidery catwalks and platforms high above, strung across the enormous area like taut wires; on the floor, huge tanks and silos loomed high.

_Starfucker, round two._

The memory of that frantic, tense hunt through the blackness of Williams' freighter reverberated through his mind for a moment, and he switched off his flashlight. After a moment, Krul did the same.

"We can't use them," Erash murmured, looking into the lightless space where Krul was standing. "He'll see us, track us down."

_Damn it, what I wouldn't do for Garrus's visor right now..._

When Krul replied, his voice was a barely audible bass rumble. "True. But we can't see."

Erash glanced down at his inactive omnitool, then fumbled for its controls. It lit up in a dazzling orange glow, and he hastily dialled the brightness right down until it was nothing more than a faint pulse. A few seconds later and he'd connected to Sensat's secure file storage over the Omega extranet, and he started pulling files down to both his own and Krul's omnitool. "Run Outliner. Should help us."

His omnitool hummed for a second, and then suddenly a pair of dim orange lenses flickered into existence over his eyes. Outliner had been Sensat's response to situations like the one they'd faced on _Starfucker_; it simulated some of the functions of Garrus's visor with basic light constructions any omnitool could run, though the code was still patchy and the details limited. After a moment, the lenses resolved and started sketching a wireframe model of the room around them, orange over black. It was nothing more than a sketch and it couldn't handle motion very well, but it was a hell of a lot better than stumbling around in the dark.

The maze of lines quivered in front of his eyes as he took a tentative step forward. The room was even larger than he'd thought, crammed with huge blocks of long-dead machinery and covered with dozens of walkways that ran all around the outside on several levels, crossing overhead like loose pieces of string. He scanned them as quickly as he could, looking for any sign of either the krogan or the others, but they all seemed to be bare.

"Solus," he muttered over the comm channel, "I think we're in the same room as you."

"As is target," Solus said tersely. "Still can't locate."

There was a flicker of movement up to the left, but even before Erash had trained his pistol on the target he saw that it was a salarian entering the room through one of the many doors on the higher levels, about a hundred metres ahead of them and halfway up. He couldn't tell whether it was Achav or Mierin.

"Here," Achav's voice said, and it was hissing with fury and hatred. Erash hadn't heard anything else from him for hours. "This ends here. He will _not_ escape me. Not again."

Erash thought about replying, but the vitriol in Achav's voice was so vicious and so complete that saying anything to him seemed like a very bad idea. Instead, he started advancing into the room, watching the surroundings for any sign of movement.

The whole place was far too still. He could hear occasional scrapes of movement in the distance and under his own feet, but for the most part they were too quiet and the acoustics of the room too chaotic for him to place them. Overhead, a couple of the catwalks had decayed far enough that they hung down listlessly, unmoving, while behind them, ancient cranes set into the distant ceiling were frozen in place. From here, they looked a lot like clawed hands reaching down.

He found that he was holding his breath and let it go, painfully aware of how loud it sounded in the silence around him. _This is just about the worst place in the galaxy to face off against a guy who can turn invisible at will. Hell, we'd have a hard time even if we could see the fucker._

"Here," Mierin said, with his customary lack of intonation. Erash glanced around, but although he could still see Achav moving on the catwalks overhead, Mierin was out of sight along with Solus. _And the krogan. Obviously._

"No lock," Solus muttered, and with a mental groan Erash recognised his talking-to-himself voice. _And that's why people stay the hell away from you, Solus. That and all the secret experiments you run on everyone you know._ "Cloaking signals use Sarrel Bands, complete light diffraction, untraceable with good scattering system unless individual key known – ah, but system designed for salarians, used by krogan – cloak must be weaker or incomplete, likely former – should expect Sarrel anomalies; small, very small; undetectable without – no, no, no! Yes!"

"Mordin?" Achav said quietly. "You have him?"

"Not yet," Solus replied instantly, his voice feverish with that obnoxious excitement he seemed to find in everything he did, "but soon, yes! Simple matter of discarding non-fractal Sarrel patterns – only a few trillion of those, not a problem – just need to reconfigure-"

"Then do it," Achav growled. Solus sniffed loudly in response, but said nothing more.

"Krogan usually hate hiding," Krul said, after a moment. They climbed a short flight of stairs up onto a walkway three or four metres above the floor and kept moving, guns at the ready. "They attack head-on. It's honourable." The contempt in his voice when he said the last word was palpable.

"Maybe," Erash said, "but this isn't exactly usual, is it?"

Krul grunted non-committally and pressed on, forcing his huge frame under a low, angled nest of pipes and through the gap beyond. As soon as he was through, Erash heard him let out a deep _hrm _of surprise, and he ducked through to see what the krogan had found.

_Oh, wow..._

Erash didn't know much about mining or the industries which had supported Omega's long-gone boom years, but he'd seen the plunge shafts before: huge, circular, vertical tunnels which ran kilometres deep into the ancient, untouched depths of Omega, long since cleared of any valuable minerals or eezo. This one was one of the largest he'd ever seen, at least thirty or forty metres across and impossibly deep, ringed by a ramshackle two-metre fence and knotted over with a mess of interlocking walkways.

He wondered how it would feel to stand on one of them and stare down into the unrelenting, pure blackness below, and then decided it wasn't the sort of thing he wanted to know.

"Well," he said, watching the lenses in front of his eyes delineate the eye-watering size of the plunge shaft, "if I ever get it into my head to start up a bungee jumping business..."

Krul snorted in amusement, but just then Solus's mile-a-minute voice burst back onto the comm channel.

"Isolated! Sarrel bleed still problematic, location system imperfect, but cloaking signal trackable to - ah - a ten-metre radius! Sending now!"

Erash's omnitool buzzed gently against his arm as Solus's program arrived, and he started it. His lenses blinked out for a second, leaving him in utter blackness apart from the tiny glow of his omnitool and the two faintly luminescent lenses over Krul's eyes, and then they flickered back into life.

Something caught his eye.

He looked up.

_Ah._

Overhead, the walkways glinted orange, their every feature outlined so that they looked like the neon-coated entertainment districts centred on Afterlife, but he'd seen all that already. What was new was the ominous green sphere hovering high overhead. _Directly_ overhead.

If he'd had to guess, he'd have said it had a radius of maybe ten metres.


	43. Leviathan: Exhausted

**LEVIATHAN**

**FIVE: EXHAUSTED**

* * *

_I think that someone is trying to kill me..._

Erash pressed himself up against the wall, heart yammering away in his chest, and really, really wished he hadn't got up that morning. The krogan was out there somewhere – that pulsating, constantly shifting green sphere was still visible through the solid metal when he turned his head far enough to be able to see it – and it was coming for him.

Loud gunfire rattled and pinged away in a sudden burst behind him. He bit the insides of his cheeks, screwed up his courage, tightened his slick grip on his pistol and slid out of cover. His lenses were great for stationary objects, but movement was tougher; he could see Krul strafing around with his shotgun booming as a blurry, occasionally krogan-shaped collection of orange lines and vertices, but the other krogan was a damn _cloud _of them, swirling across the floor like a thick, deadly fog, all within the green miasma of the cloaking signal. He opened fire at it, but for all he knew he could have been hitting nothing but air – and then something hard crashed into his kinetic barriers, knocking him back, and he scrambled back into cover.

"Damn it," he snarled under his breath, and quickly altered the parameters of Sensat's program. His view changed: the orange lines grew thinner and fewer, pared down until they were just showing him where the boundaries of physical objects were; past that, there was just the blackness of the room, lit with a ghostly flickering by the gunfire. The motion-sensing aspects he turned off entirely.

"Suppress the son of a bitch!" Achav screamed over the comm channel. "He's not getting away!"

Erash slotted a fresh thermal clip into his pistol, breathed in heavily, then leapt back around the corner. Now, the green sphere was slightly smaller, the result of Solus improving the cloaking signal intercept, and as he emerged it vanished entirely.

"He's gone dark!" Krul called from somewhere, but he was wrong: ahead of him, past an inactive conveyor belt, two brilliant white lights floated in mid-air. _And suddenly those nice,intimidating eyes aren't so useful, are they, asshole?_

"Eyes on target," Erash said over comms, and started firing. The pistol had a powerful kick in his hands, and as it spat blue-white bolts towards the krogan, the whole area flashed with the same light, outlining the enormous silhouette of the krogan _charging right this way-_

Erash hurled himself out of the way with every ounce of power he could scrape up, but although he cleared the krogan's physical form, a heavy slam of biotic power caught him in mid-air and sent him flying. One of the vast storage tanks stopped him by knocking the wind out of him, and the rib he'd broken a few hours ago howled in protest despite the drugs in his system. Somehow, he'd kept hold of his gun, and he staggered upright as those terrible white lights swung his way again.

He wouldn't have made it out of the way in time. He'd have been smashed up against the warm metal, every bone in his body crushed into splinters and powder – but that didn't happen, which, on the whole, he felt was a positive development.

Instead, the krogan slammed into a brilliant blue wall of biotic energy which hadn't been there a split second earlier with a noise like someone striking a high-tension steel wire with a hammer and staggered back – and in the electric blue flash, Erash saw Krul's hulking shape emerging from the shadows.

His shotgun roared and the black-clad krogan's barriers sparked, and those searchlight eyes jerked around to focus on his attacker. Unearthly light spilled out across the room as the krogan's fists started to glow brightly with his own biotic power. Erash took advantage of his distraction to pick himself off the floor, grunting with pain, and scurry away into the shadows as the krogan sent a crackling biotic warp ripping through the air towards Krul. The biotic barrier instantly shifted position and caught the warp, obliterating it in an ear-splitting screech of biotic annihilation, then flicked off just as Krul fired again.

The krogan took the shot onto his barriers without flinching and brought up his own gun to fire back, but the barrier flashed back into existence a little ahead of where it had been before, and the shot fizzed and died – and then the barrier was down again, and Krul was firing again. The timing was flawless, as if Krul had been directing the biotics himself, but Erash knew better; Mierin stood a few feet behind Krul, his raised hands wrapped in a bright biotic aura, and as soon as Krul's shotgun blast hammered against the krogan's shields, the barrier appeared once again.

Erash wondered how many times that barrier had saved his life during his STG days. At least five, by his count, and that was being conservative. _And that was the real reason we called him the Wall. Can't talk to the bastard, but nothing gets through him._

The krogan tried one more time to get through Mierin's barrier, but that was always a losing battle. Erash shielded his eyes from the blinding blue flash – unnecessarily, since the lenses filtered out all the excess light – and then cursed under his breath as the krogan disappeared again. Immediately, the green signifying where the cloaking signals were emanating from popped up on his HUD, but the shape it produced was misshapen and constantly in flux. Krul kept firing at the spot where the krogan had been, but he was hitting nothing but air.

"Where'd he go?" Achav demanded, skidding around a corner to the right with his rifle raised. "_Where is he?_"

"Cloaked," Solus said. "Oh! Clever, very clever. Cloaking signal resets each time device is turned on again. STG hallmark. Nobody else has this tech. Must have taken it from a victim."

Darkness had descended again, leaving Erash's lenses as his only source of sight, but he could still see the cold, tight-lipped fury quivering on Achav's face even through the orange wireframe. He said nothing and turned away, marching off alone.

"So what now?" Erash asked, looking around. The green was even less helpful now; by its approximation, the krogan was in at least six places at once. He grunted in irritation and turned it off. "Where the hell did he go?"

"Working on it," Solus said distractedly.

_Well, that's a help._

"I have an idea," Krul said, then started shouting. "Face us, coward! Or don't you have the quad to come out from behind your little cloak?"

"Ah, so your idea was to antagonise him some more," Erash said into the ensuing silence, after the last echoes of Krul's bellowing had faded away. "Nice."

"Coward?" a voice rumbled in reply a few seconds later, and Erash jumped half out of his skin. He whirled around, searching for the source of the sound; it seemed like it had come from somewhere above him, but even that was hard to tell. "Better a coward than a traitor!"

"The krogan are a failed race!" Krul shot back. "The genophage didn't go far enough! I'm not a traitor, I'm a realist!"

There was a long moment of silence before the krogan replied again, and this time there was a quieter note of sorrow under the anger. "Have you ever watched dozens of your children die before they ever took their first breath? We weren't alive for the Rebellions, but we still suffer for them. We're not a failed race. We're a murdered race. Billions of us, murdered. All I want is a little _payback!_"

The last word was a furious, brutal snarl, and half a second later a ton of armoured krogan smashed into Krul from above. Erash yelped in shock and recoiled, instinctively firing on the huge black shape as the two krogan started brawling on the ground, but he forced himself to hold his fire. Krul seemed to have seen it coming in time to dodge the worst of it, but from the confusion of orange wires Erash could see he was underneath the krogan, fending off heavy blows to the skull as armour crashed against armour.

An incandescent wave of biotic light swept across the area, knocking both krogan head over heels, and Erash threw a glance left to see Mierin silently advancing with his hands held high. Krul was still staggering to his feet when the krogan was already up, and even as Erash started firing he saw that huge shotgun flash and heard it roar. Mierin went tumbling; his shields had taken the blow, but the sheer power of it had been enough to force the barriers to offload some of the kinetic energy back onto him. Spread out evenly, it wouldn't do much more than knock him over, but that gave the krogan an opening.

Erash's shots were pinging uselessly away off the krogan's shields, and from the right Achav wasn't having any better luck – _and where the hell is Solus?_ - but without armour, a single blast from the krogan's shotgun would be lethal. As soon as he saw the krogan start to turn his way, Erash started to leap back behind some towering piece of long-dead machinery, but it was too late. Time seemed to slow down to a crawl as he watched a gleaming blue shell sweep around the krogan, and then slowly start to contract-

The biotic charge hit him like the krogan had been fired out of a mass relay.

He had shields. That saved his life. If they'd been depleted, the krogan would have smeared him across the floor as if he were made out of jelly. With them up, enough of the force was lessened to just send him tumbling wildly across twenty metres of mercifully empty floor. His vision turned into an agonising whirlwind of disconnected orange lines zooming across a black studded with millions of blossoming green-purple flowers.

He came to a stop with pain pulsing wetly through his entire body and blood staining half a dozen points on his jumpsuit where the impact had opened up cuts or grazes, but he was still conscious, and by the feel of it, nothing important had been broken. The orange had gone from his blurred vision, and when he looked down at his where his omnitool should have been, the glow had vanished.

He lay there for a moment, wondering if it was worth getting up.

In the distance, gunfire crackled and voices shouted, but he couldn't pick out any words. White and blue flickers of light shivered on the walls, and occasionally he caught sight of a silhouette in motion ahead of him.

Slowly, painfully, he rolled onto his side and dragged himself to his feet, his every bruised muscle and aching bone shouting in protest inside him, and looked for his gun. He couldn't see it, but then again, he couldn't see much.

He reached down and flicked the manual emergency switch for the flashlight on the underside of his dead omnitool. Nothing happened. He tried again, and again, and on the third attempt a dazzling cone of light sprang to life. He swept it across the floor, squinting through a haze of pain as he searched for his gun, but there was nothing there but small splashes of his own blood.

"Fuck," he spat, and wiped away a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth with his sleeve. _And I can't even fucking talk to them with my 'tool dead..._

By the sound of it the gunfire had moved further away now, though the flashes were still flickering through the whole room like staccato lightning strikes, pounding nails of pain further and further into his skull. He stood there for a few seconds, staring out towards the source of the noise.

_I should leave them. I can't do anything... without a gun, without an omnitool, without armour, without a single piece of explosives on me... I'm useless. It would be suicide to stay._

_I could walk out of here right now, go to Garrus, hole up in the base and wait until the krogan gets bored and leaves Omega. It would be easy._

…

Another biotic explosion ripped through the air somewhere off in the distance, sending sheets of light skittering over the ancient factory – and it might have been Erash's imagination, but just for a moment he thought he saw the shadow of a salarian staggering back projected onto a wall by the light. It vanished almost before he could see it, replaced by deep, impenetrable shadows as the gunfire went on.

_I could go._

_But I'm STG._

_We hold the line._

"I'm really going to regret this," he muttered, and started running. His battered legs protested furiously with every step, but he forced himself to go faster and faster, vaulting over railings and ducking under low-hanging wires as he headed towards the firefight, his flashlight casting a wavering circle of light ahead of him, and all the while the gunfire snapped and snarled ahead of him, the chatter of assault rifles broken by the crack of pistols and the throaty roar of shotguns.

He came to the start of a walkway and charged up the steps, coming out onto one of the walkways criss-crossing over the enormous plunge shaft. Away to his left, the krogan was forcing Krul further and further back along another walkway with successive shotgun blasts, occasionally blocked in a shower of blue sparks by Mierin's biotic barrier – but they were smaller and weaker than before; wherever he was, the Wall was tiring.

Erash came to one of the circular platforms hanging overhead and skidded to a stop, breathing hard. Unlike the walkway, the platform had no railings around it; there was just an edge, and below that a long, long drop. It connected to another narrow walkway on the other side, and Erash hurried over to it, keeping pace with the running battle below.

As he watched, the krogan's harsh white eyes gleamed behind another brilliant handful of biotic energy, and Krul stumbled back as it slammed against his chest. A shotgun blast caught him in the knee and brought him down like a felled tree, almost too wide to fit on the walkway, and the krogan was advancing for the killing blow. Before he realised what he was doing, Erash was hauling himself up onto the railing.

_Of all the stupid, stupid things I've done in my lifetime-_

He jumped.

_-this has got be top three._

Over the next month, he didn't sleep well. He'd wake up in the middle of his hour in a cold sweat with the sight of the vast, yawning gap beneath him burned onto his retinas and curse his stupidity, thinking over all the myriad ways it could have gone wrong and sent him screaming to his death.

But it worked.

He'd been maybe four metres higher than the other walkway and at least the same away from it horizontally. In theory, it wasn't such a hard jump. At least, that was what he was still frantically tell himself when the krogan's headlamp eyes swivelled to meet him a fraction of a second before he impacted.

What happened next, Erash could only piece together later, a jumbled, frenetic few seconds of heart-stopping terror and chaos. All he knew at the time was what he saw.

He saw the krogan recoil in surprise and from the physical force of sixty-five kilos of flying salarian hitting it hard in the face, then saw stars as he fell back against the railing and to the ground.

He saw Krul clamber unsteadily to his feet, using his shotgun as a crutch.

He saw Solus and Mierin on another walkway, both firing away at the krogan.

He saw the krogan's shields fail with a faint blue fizz.

He saw Achav take a running leap from a platform away on the other side, and he saw his flashlight's beam fall on him by chance while he was in the air, perfectly illuminating the grimly insane look in his eyes.

He saw Achav land on the krogan and wrap himself around its head, trying to bring his pistol to bear as the krogan bucked and tried to throw him off.

He saw Krul fire his shotgun at exactly the same time as the krogan ran up against another of Mierin's barriers, and he saw half of the krogan's side chewed away in a gout of ruined armour and viscera.

He saw the krogan, already off-balance, stagger back.

He saw it hit the railing.

He saw Achav, seeing what was coming, trying and failing to throw himself clear.

He saw the railing give way under the immense pressure of a ton of krogan and salarian, and he saw them start to fall.

And after that, there was just silence.

Ignoring everything else, Erash got once more to his feet, pushing the pain out of his mind, and walked over to the broken railing hanging forlornly out over the pit. He was the only one moving.

He looked down.

Far, far below, he could see two tiny spots of white light, occasionally vanishing from view for a moment as the krogan tumbled head over heels, without even a sound. He watched for a few seconds, hypnotised by the sight, until finally the lights grew smaller and smaller, winked out and disappeared into the darkness.

"Erash," Achav said quietly.

Erash stiffened in surprise, then swung his flashlight down towards the source of the voice. Achav was there, hanging by one hand from a broken bunch of wires which had once run along the bottom of the walkway. He was a couple of metres down, and when Erash's light passed over him he stared unflinchingly back into it.

Erash licked dry, blood-crusted lips and chuckled, or at least tried to. "Had us worried there for a minute, man. Need a hand? Krul, grab my legs."

"If you say so," Krul said. He slung his shotgun over his back and reached down, picking Erash up by his calves as easily as Erash could have picked up a child. He began lowering Erash down towards Achav, as Erash tried very hard not to look at the horribly long drop.

"OK," Erash grunted, and reached down with his right hand, illuminating it with the flashlight on his left. "Grab my hand."

Achav was well within range to do just that, but he just looked blankly up at Erash and slowly shook his head.

"I can't."

Erash shifted position slightly, trying to get his hand a little closer. "Come on, this is easy. Just grab-"

"I said I can't," Achav said sharply. "You don't understand. How could you? You were too damn stupid to work out the obvious, like always."

Erash blinked, and shook his head in confusion. "What? What the hell are you talking about?"

Achav held his gaze for a moment with dark, hollow eyes, then looked down into the blackness below. "Mordin. You understand."

A pause. Then, from up above on the walkway where Solus and Mierin had stood: "Yes. Now."

Erash tried to twist around to see Solus, but he was too low. "Solus? What is it?"

Solus didn't respond.

"Tell him, Mordin," Achav said, after a moment, still staring down the plunge shaft. His voice was soft, weary, resigned. "Tell them all."

Solus sniffed, then paused for a moment. "Leak existed within STG, within Firebreak. List of personnel and their locations released one at a time to krogan. Few could know what was leaked."

Erash didn't understand for a few seconds. Then, realisation hit him, cold, clinical and merciless. Achav's words echoed back at him from the shadows of the past, filled with fury and hatred: _He will not escape me. Not again..._

He closed his eyes and slowly exhaled. He didn't feel anything. He was long past that.

"It was you," he said eventually. His words echoed away down the shaft. "You told him where to find us."

Achav didn't look up. "Yes."

"Why?"

This time, Achav turned his body from the pit and looked up. He seemed to have aged ten years in the last few minutes; every line on his face seemed deeper, and his eyes were old and tired.

"He killed Jolin," Achav said hollowly. "I had to kill him, and this was the only way to lure him out. I thought I could get him when I gave him Hilarom's location, but I was too slow... and then there were two people I had to avenge. And then three, four... and I couldn't stop. I'd come too far. If I'd given up then, they'd have died for nothing. The krogan had to die. I couldn't let it go."

Erash had been looking straight into his eyes as Achav spoke, but there was nothing alive in them any more. He felt like he could see right through them, into the shadows of the past which massed behind them. _He's a dead man, _he thought, without any malice. It was simply true.

"Take my hand," Erash finally said, knowing that it was useless. "Come back. We can talk..." _He won't. He can't. And I don't know if I want him to._

Achav looked up at his outstretched arm for a long, long moment, then shook his head. "Yisma... I'm exhausted. Let me go. I can't come back, not from what I've done. Like I said, it ends here." He looked down into the blackness below once more, then back up, with a thin half-smile on his face. "Where that damned krogan died. Fitting. I grappled with him to the last. Remember that. It's not much, weighed against what I did to get here, but it's something."

Mutely, Erash nodded.

Achav held his gaze for a moment, then let go.

Erash watched him fall. It was much more graceful than the krogan's tumbling. He simply fell straight down, slowly turning until he lay on his back, arms outstretched, and all the while their eyes were locked.

After a few seconds, Achav fell out of the light, and the grasping, swollen shadows below reached up to claim him.


	44. Leviathan: Epilogue

**LEVIATHAN**

**EPILOGUE**

* * *

It was the kind of place where the closest the tables got to being cleaned was when someone accidentally knocked over a jug of water. The food was a potent recipe for an instant heart attack, the service came with a scowl and the prices were somehow both cheap and extortionate at the same time, but as far as Erash concerned, it was worth at least a couple of Galactic Diamonds.

The four of them were sat in a booth off to the side, occasionally attracting strange glances from patrons for the krogan-salarian mix – _or hell, maybe it's because of all the blood. _There were a few hundred like it across Omega, catering to the general levo community; usually, they'd only serve three or four dishes for each species' particular preference, and the aptly-named _Jonny's House of Eats _was no exception. Still, they served big, fatty steaks of synthesised juhn, and that was more than enough.

Solus was staring off into the distance, his face clouded by thought, chewing uncharacteristically slowly on a nutrient bar, while Krul was hacking into a steak about three times the size of Erash's. Mierin was methodically cutting a plate of vacral into small, bite-size pieces, each of them almost perfectly square, his face completely blank. They were eating in silence, and none of them looked at Erash when he glanced up from his own plate.

_What is there to say?_

The food wasn't _good_ per se, but it was plentiful. Erash hadn't eaten since the previous evening, and he'd been the one insisting on stopping off at Jonny's. They hadn't even changed; his torn, blood-stained and sweat-soaked jumpsuit stood out even on Omega, although Solus's lab getup wasn't exactly the usual fare either. _Full armour in a restaurant, though... on Omega, that might as well be formal wear._

Around them, it was business as usual on Omega. In the next booth, two elcor were having what seemed to be a polite conversation, until you listened to their exact words and realised it was their equivalent of a cacophonic screaming match. A large human family with at least five kids occupied a big table nearby, the parents looking increasingly harried, and on the other side of them, an asari and a female batarian in body armour were engaged in hushed, furtive discussions over a half-empty bottle of Noverian rum. A group of six or seven well-dressed college-age salarians in a corner were sharing one of Jonny's specialities, a two-foot adapted version of the popular human _pizza_ for whichever species was buying, and a small, sallow hanar floated alone over a plate of greasy-looking fish, poking mournfully at it with one drooping tentacle. _And they said multiculturalism was dead. Say what you like about Omega, but at least it shits on everyone equally._

He watched the salarians for a while out of the corner of his eye, watching them bicker and joke among themselves. He remembered the few times Firebreak's personnel had done something similar with painful clarity. He'd try talking to them about the latest out of the krogan rugby leagues or whether that sequel to _The Phage _was ever going to come out, and he'd get back looks of incomprehension or disdain... and then they'd talk for hours and hours about bioethics and the finer points of chemistry while he sat and drunk himself into a stupor. Eventually, he'd stopped going at all.

_And right now, I could be sitting with Weaver and Melenis in some bar on the wrong end of Omega, doing the same damn thing, but I'd enjoy it a hell of a lot more._

He took another mouthful of steak and chewed thoughtfully, staring out through the thick, broad window on the other side of the diner. The view was about as upscale as the rest of the place; there were a handful of twinkling lights, but mostly it was a window onto indistinct shadows and darkness. They weren't far from the industrial sectors, and once you went any further down, those lights started getting few and far between.

_And they're down there. Somewhere. Somewhere deep in the darkest pits of Omega, there's a krogan, and there's Achav. Or what's left of them, anyway. I'm guessing not much._

_Strange. The galaxy's so big, but the one place nobody will ever go isn't the bottom of some ocean on a godsforsaken ammonia world or some expanse of deep space out by the Ismar Frontier... it's here, no more than a couple of klicks from where I'm sitting. The plunge shafts, where everything of value was stripped out centuries ago, and all that's left in those pits is the crap which didn't have a place up here... and nobody will ever go down there alive again, not if civilisation lasts another million years. One day, Omega's going to be broken down for its parts, or blown up by some nutjob – heh, or some AI – or maybe the place will finally tear itself to shreds in another civil war, and then there won't be an Omega any more, and nobody will know about the bodies. There won't be any archaeologists poring over the dead industrial sectors of a backwater space station in the ass-end of nowhere. There'll just be a pile of dead flesh and broken armour, little pieces of it, slowly decaying until it's just dust._

_So that's what you'll get, Achav. That's what you'll be. Not a memory, not a legacy, just dust. Dust. Like the rest of us. Like all the people who died because of this stupid shit you started. Like the STG, like the krogan, like the genophage. None of this is going to matter. And when you start thinking like that, there's no end to it._

_Fuck me, I need a drink._

He shook his head, trying to blink away the image of Achav's hollow eyes staring up at him as he fell – _no point even trying, that one's going to stay with me the rest of my days –_ and glanced down at his steak. It was brown and fat and glistening and when he stuck his fork in it it stayed upright, but his appetite had just evaporated entirely.

Opposite him, Solus flicked his eyes towards Erash, then looked away almost instantly. Then, he examined the remnants of his nutrient bar, folded the wrapping back up, and laid it almost fastidiously on the tray.

"Will contact STG," he said, without looking at Erash. "Cancel reinforcements, if they ever existed. Put an end to this."

"Oh, yeah?" Erash said. "What're you going to say, then? 'Hey, guys, turns out one of your most trusted operatives got half a dozen ex-STG men killed because of some stupid vendetta, but it's all OK now'?"

Mordin nodded. "Yes." He paused, and cocked his head. "Might rephrase."

Erash shrugged. "Fair enough. What else is there to say, really? You play with fire, you get burned. And burn a bunch of other people."

"He was a good man." Solus stopped, seemed to think for a second, then added one word: "Once."

"It's not what he was," Erash said, shaking his head, "it's what he did. The past has a way of sneaking up on you like that. It's all going to come out some day, Solus. Firebreak and all the shit which comes with it. You know that."

"Yes," Solus said, and stood up. "But not today. Have work to do. Has been... good to catch up."

"No, it hasn't," Erash muttered, staring down at his plate. He heard Solus sniff one last time, and then his boots clicked away across the diner towards the door.

"So," Krul said, after a moment, "what now?"

Erash glanced up at the krogan. "We go home and pretend this never happened. I'm done with the STG."

Krul let out a short rumble of a laugh. "Home? Didn't that explode?"

"Oh, hell," Erash groaned, leaning forward to rest his head on his hands. His battered ribs jabbed painfully at him. "I'd fucking forgotten about that. Maybe I was hoping it was a bad dream."

"Well, it's Omega," Krul said. "You can't go anywhere on this damn station without tripping over abandoned apartments."

Erash waved a tired hand. "I've got a place to go."

"Join us," Mierin said.

Erash blinked and looked up. Mierin laid his cutlery neatly at the side of his plate and then looked on impassively, waiting for some kind of reaction.

"Uh," Erash said, and looked helplessly at Krul.

The krogan shrugged his massive shoulders. "First I've heard of it. It's good work, though, and if he's happy to have you, I am too."

"But, well, why?" Erash said, almost plaintively, looking from one to the other.

"Because you're good enough," Mierin replied instantly. As far as he could recall, it was the longest sentence Erash had ever heard out of his mouth. Four words from Mierin was worth a hundred times that from anyone else, but Erash was no closer to understanding the mind behind that mask of a face.

He shook his head dazedly. "Look, it's not that- I mean, I have work already-"

"Security work," Krul said, an ugly note of disdain colouring his tone. "Maintaining the status quo. We might not pay as well, or we might pay better – and our business makes the galaxy a better place. There's always room for another pair of hands."

Erash looked up into Krul's watchful, serious eyes, and just for a moment he was tempted. _One of these days, Archangel is going to get me killed. I could leave, quit while I'm ahead. He's right. It's good work. Bounty-hunting... a touch of the romantic about it, although I suppose you could say the same about vigilantism._

_I could do it. But it's the same choice as before, isn't it? I could have walked away down in the industrial sectors and saved my own skin, but I didn't. Maybe I should have. But I didn't._

_Damn it. Why is nothing ever easy?_

…

_Oh, but it is. Just for once, it's easy. I can't believe it took me this long to see it. There might be problems down the line... but they're good enough. I never thought I'd say that about a krogan. Or about Mierin. But they are. They really are._

"I can't join you," he said eventually, and smiled thinly. _I wonder, how annoyed is Garrus going to be about this_. "But allow me to make a counter-offer..."


	45. Day Of Rest: Blood

**MASS EFFECT: INTERREGNUM**

* * *

**DAY OF REST**

**ONE: BLOOD**

* * *

The Hyperion Ale House stood in Ulkom District. It occupied three floors of one of the massive durasteel starscrapers which speared down Omega's whole length, opening onto one of the station's thousands of winding, irregular streets. According to the advertisements splayed across the building, it offered more than nine hundred different beers from across the known galaxy, stretching from the most corrosively cheap batarian brews to painfully expensive ultra-distilled quarian ale. Not for the first time, those bright lights were illuminating two arguing turians.

"It's the fuckin' principle of the thing, you know?" Sidonis said, slurring his words more than a little. "Right?"

Garrus shook his head. "No. It's not. My shot, my kill."

Sidonis spat on the floor and spun around, hurling his empty bottle off the side of the walkway. It shimmered for a moment in the lurid green lights on the bar's façade, then vanished down into the night. "I still say you're an asshole."

"That could hurt someone, you know," Garrus said sagely.

"Yeah? This city, 's probably a good thing," Sidonis said, staggering back towards Garrus. "And it was my fuckin' kill, man!"

"Really," Garrus said flatly. He leaned back against the wall of the bar, listening to the muffled thump of the music inside beat its way through the metal. "Care to enlighten me as to how?"

Sidonis held up all three fingers, squinted at them to make sure he'd got the number right, then started counting down. "Number one: I took out the guy's shields."

"The shields which Ripper had already nearly depleted," Garrus said. Sidonis started to respond, but the door of the bar slid open to reveal a boisterous group of batarians, all shouting over each other so loudly and so confusingly that the translators could only pick out a few words, most of which were obscene. They didn't even notice them.

"Now, as I was saying," Sidonis said, "fuck you. Those shields were already what, sixty percent recharged? Fuckin' high-end Armax shit. How the fuck did Shurta even get hold of that?"

"I would imagine he exchanged it for currency," Garrus said thoughtfully. "What with this being a market economy and all."

Sidonis tried to jab a finger at Garrus's chest, and missed. "Doesn't matter. Principle of the thing. I took down those shields-"

"-and Mierin saved your ass from the guy with the rocket launcher," Garrus interjected. "No barrier, no Sidonis, and _definitely_ no kill."

"Like hell am I giving that son of a bitch any credit," Sidonis said darkly. "Even for a salarian, he's a fuckin' nutjob. Crazy eyes. Never says a damn word."

"And saves your ass every now and again."

"Many people have saved my shapely ass over the years, and I cannot blame them," Sidonis said, apparently trying to muster some kind of gravitas. "An ass in danger should never be disregarded."

Garrus snorted. "Yeah. It's the cornerstone of our civilisation. That's why all our leaders talk out of it all the time."

"Damn right," Sidonis muttered. "Where did I put my beer?"

Garrus pointed. Sidonis turned and squinted along the length of his finger, then walked unsteadily over towards the railing at the edge of the walkway. Garrus detached himself from the wall and followed.

"Shit," Sidonis said, staring down into the abyss. "Really?"

Garrus patted him on the back. "Yeah. Don't worry. It probably felt no pain."

"Like Shurta, I guess. When you stole my kill."

"I see a shot, I take it."

"You always get the good kills," Sidonis said, with bitterness that didn't seem entirely faked. "Deus, Golf... that other batarian guy, can't remember his name, you made his eyes explode or something... Weaver's smuggler guy, can't remember his name either... Shirion, you got that fucker pretty good – and then you get Shurta too? You're a fuckin' glory hound, man. I bet you've got a little list of all your accomplishments you can get off to, don't you?"

"No- well, yes," Garrus said, before hastily adding: "But not the second part."

"Give it time," Sidonis muttered darkly. "One day, we'll run out of porn."

Garrus snorted. "I'm pretty sure that there's enough porn in existence that you could spend a few millennia watching the lot of it. I mean, the asari alone have been making the stuff for thousands of years."

"Yeah, I guess," Sidonis said, without much enthusiasm. He was staring off into the distance, the flickering lights overhead casting strange shadows across his face. "Nothing lasts forever, though."

Garrus punched him playfully on the arm. "You haven't drunk enough to be at the nihilism stage yet, kid."

"Nothing except this fucking city," Sidonis said, apparently ignoring him. "I mean, we've been here for months, man. Fuckin' months, and we've killed so damn many of them. Maybe a thousand... and it's a drop in the fucking ocean. I mean, Shurta and his lot alone, that had to be near a hundred, all told, and what's that going to change?"

"We took the bastards off the street," Garrus said. "There's a lot of people who're going to live because of that."

Sidonis shook his head, still staring out over the railing at the lights beyond. His voice had changed a little, losing some of its slurring, as if he were spontaneously sobering up. "Are there? The Suns and the Pack are already moving in on their territory. What's changed? It's like we're trying to swim up a fuckin' waterfall. The amount of bodies that hit the floor every night on this station, we could leave tomorrow and nobody would know."

"That's not true," Garrus said sharply. "There are people out there, real people, and they're alive because of us."

Sidonis glanced sideways at him, then looked back up at the vista, wiping his mouth with a sleeve. "I don't see 'em."

"They're out there," Garrus repeated. He followed Sidonis's gaze, but there was nothing to see but the indistinct, twisting lights of aircar traffic which coursed through the station, like tiny glowing filaments outlined against the twilight. "We've seen them. You've seen the graffiti, the little angels on the walls. We're helping."

"Yeah," Sidonis said, after a long, long moment of silence. "Guess we are. Just doesn't feel like it, sometimes. Just feels like we're killing our way to an early grave."

_The two aren't mutually exclusive,_ Garrus thought, but he kept that to himself. Instead, he conjured a smile and clapped Sidonis on the back again, as if the gesture would gain some new meaning the more he did it. "What it is and what it feels like aren't always the same, I guess. It was never going to be easy."

"Easy," Sidonis muttered, almost under his breath. He turned and leaned back on the rail, shaking his head. "Fuck."

Abruptly, he started walking, heading aimlessly down the empty street.

"Where're you headed?" Garrus called after him.

Sidonis didn't turn. "Don't know. Get some azure or something... Don't know. Tomorrow."

Garrus had started after him, but he slowed and came to a stop, watching Sidonis's retreating back as he disappeared into the shadows.

"Tomorrow, then," he murmured to himself. He stood there alone for a moment, then headed off in the other direction, back towards the base. He'd had more than enough of Omega for one day. _Or for a lifetime._

* * *

Butler's plate lay empty before him, save for the sad pile of radish pushed diplomatically to the side. He hated radish. He sat back with a contented sigh, caught Nalah's eye, and raised his glass.

An inch or so of a pleasantly sharp, fruity asari wine swirled gently at the bottom. Asari wine tended to be an attractive proposition; the asari themselves were so absurdly long-lived that their fifty-year-old vintages were often priced about the same as cheap supermarket wine. What asari would have considered cheap swill was eminently palatable for humans, and suddenly Butler's vigilante salary went a lot further.

"Are we toasting someone?" Nalah said, smiling over the rim of her glass. "That's a new one."

"Why not?" Butler said, and cleared his throat. "To the most incredible, beautiful, intelligent and all-around best person in my life: to me."

Nalah burst out laughing, loud enough to draw some irritated looks from other patrons of the restaurant. _Culina Inferna _was one of Omega's higher-end establishments, and its atmosphere was aiming for 'classy'; while there was no dress-code, anyone coming in in less than smart-casual would get dirty looks and slow service, and anything more than quiet conversation drew disapproval. Butler didn't particularly care. For him, hearing Nalah laugh was worth a lot more than that.

"Ah, you're a charmer, Mike," she said, and raised her glass in response. "To you, then."

"At last, the recognition I deserve," Butler said primly. They touched glasses, and he downed the rest of the cinnamon-coloured liquid, glancing around as he did so. With the lifelike hologram of an elegant cityscape in place of a window, the only hint that they were on Omega was the duo of turian guards in sleek black armour standing by the entrance, courtesy of Omega First Security. They were the only turians in the room; most of the clientèle were human, sprinkled with a few asari, one of whom was their waiter.

"So," Nalah said, setting her glass down with a quiet but firm clink, "tell me."

Butler put on what he hoped was a coquettish smile and sat back. "Tell you what, dear?"

Nalah leaned forward to match him. "Mikhael."

Butler recognised the warning tone and knew when to quit. "OK, OK," he said, and laid his hand on hers, gently running his fingers across her soft, coffee-coloured skin. "You want to hear the whole thing?"

She smiled. "It sounds like a good story. Just as long as it doesn't end with you getting killed."

Butler frowned, then slowly shook his head. "No, I don't think that happened. I would remember."

Their waiter came by at that moment, and Butler waited until she'd whisked away their plates before he started.

"So, we'd been working on these guys for about a week – following their patrols, listening in on their comms, all the usual stuff. Garrus said we weren't going to handle it like they did with the Shadows – that was a prolonged guerilla thing they did just before I joined up. The plan this time was to wipe them out almost completely with our first attack. Very turian, except we didn't exactly have overwhelming force."

Nalah nodded. "Who are 'these guys', exactly?"

"Rhi'hesh Shurta and his gang," Butler said. "They controlled a couple of smaller districts quite far down the station; usual racketeering, drug dealing, so on. Guess what they called themselves."

"Rhi'hesh Shurta's Lonely Hearts Club Band?" Nalah offered.

Butler grinned. "Oh, better than that. They called themselves the Shurta Foundation."

"Oh, wow," Nalah said, shaking her head in disbelief. "That's reason enough to kill them right there."

"Not exactly Groucho material, I know," Butler said, "but wait: they get stupider. We isolated one of their leaders – Selkeet Shirion, lovely guy – out on a regular patrol thing every day. It's a show of force thing, meant to keep the people they're extorting in line, but it was just him and a few nameless henchmen. So, we hatch a plan. You remember a few years back, when I was working on that novelty imitation software?"

Nalah nodded. "Mimico."

"Yeah. Well, I dragged that out of storage, and we made ourselves some decent facsimiles of their voices. Took a few days to get enough data, but we got it, and then we had 'em. Garrus took a team out and ambushed them in an alley, killed them all before they even got a shot off, and then... we enlist our dead friend Shirion's voice to tell Shurta – over his own woefully unsecured comms network - that his precious territory is being invaded by an army of Blood Pack-backed vorcha."

"And they believed that?"

Butler heard the incredulity in her voice and nodded, smiling. _I didn't quite believe it myself, but then again... what did Garrus call them? Cowardly and superstitious, something like that._ "Like I said. They're idiots. Or they _were_ idiots, because they came charging out in force to where 'Shirion' called in the attack, at which point..." He reached down and crumpled his napkin in his fist. "At which point, they were well and truly fucked. I didn't see it in person, but by all accounts, they were ripped apart. Erash had mines and bombs all over the place, we had snipers and biotics in buildings on every side, and those new guys – Krul and Mierin – tore right through them on the ground. Not even an injury on our side, and I don't even know how many dead on theirs. Shurta went within about ten seconds, or so I hear. I think they're arguing about who got him."

Nalah smiled, but there was a slightly disquieting faintness to it. "So what are you doing with the turf they had?"

"Well," Butler said slowly, "there's the rub. For now, it looks like it'll be taken over by the Blue Suns. The Blood Pack are eyeing it as well, from the other side, they've got a hold in Brayar... I don't know. The Suns, I hope. They're not quite as bad."

"So everything you did benefited the Blue Suns."

Butler caught the sceptical tone and shook his head sharply. "No. Shurta was a vicious little thug. The Suns are vicious businessmen. People will be better off now."

"Maybe," Nalah said, "but what about later? This is just entrenching the big groups more and more, and then when you can't dislodge them..."

"There's a name for monolithic organisations of criminals who run everything," Butler said sourly. His good humour was evaporating faster than the bubbles in the half-glass of carbonated water in front of him. "We call it a government."

"And that's what you want to do? Give Omega a government?"

Butler waved a vague hand. "No- well, it wouldn't be a bad thing, but... we're making the station better. That's all we _can_ do. We can't fix Omega, not completely, changing the system is beyond us... but we can help." He leaned forward, set his hands on the table. "I've had this same conversation in my head more times than you can imagine. The answer is always the same. We have to do _something_, but whatever it is, it can never be enough."

Nalah edged back a little, and he realised he'd been gripping the table hard enough for his knuckles to whiten. He let go and sat back, forcing himself to relax. There'd been elation earlier, when the plan went off without a hitch, but now it had gone entirely, and there was a quiet, intense anger there instead – not at her, but at the station, the gangs, the stupid, immutable injustice of the whole thing. She didn't necessarily know that, though, and he forced a smile he wasn't sure was merited to try and wipe away the memory of that little flash of rage.

"That's how I see it, anyway," he said, after a moment.

"I understand, Mike, I do," Nalah said. She didn't return the smile; the damage was done, and Butler could feel the warmth dripping away from the atmosphere between them, silently cursing his own temper. "But I just wonder... in the end, what's the use? Is it really worth all the people you've killed – I mean, not you, I know you don't-"

"It has to be," Butler said, cutting her off rather brusquely. "Sometimes you have to kill to save."

* * *

Garrus was about halfway home when he made an error he would later consider to be worthy of a place in his lamentably extensive personal hall of fame.

He was on the outskirts of a relatively unimportant Pack-controlled district he couldn't even name, cutting through back streets to take a shortcut to Kima. The streets were empty; not many people lived around here, and those that did tended to stay inside. It was the vorcha that scared them away, and it was because of the vorcha that Garrus didn't particularly want to take a more direct route. Even out here he could occasionally see the glint of yellow eyes and yellower teeth in alleys and on rooftops. His concealed clipless pistol was a reassuring weight in his pocket.

Crumbling, ramshackle buildings loomed leerily overhead, their irregular shapes casting strange, twisted arrays of shadows under the omnipresent orange lights. For every one of them, he spotted a dozen vantage points where any halfway competent sniper could have splattered his brains across the floor, but that was par for the course on Omega. That was why he'd survived those long months before the chaos brought by Sensat's ship; Omega was the lone gunman's paradise. He rather hoped that he'd never be on the wrong end of a scope.

He was almost through and into Westro when he saw Garm.

At first he didn't believe his eyes. He saw the figure stagger out of a door spilling thick yellow light onto the street about thirty metres ahead of him and immediately recognised the skin tone, the build, the scars. A zoom and quick facial recognition scan with his visor confirmed it, at least to 83% accuracy.

He was alone. The leader of the Blood Pack on Omega, alone at night in an empty street, far away from the core of his territory, and quite possibly drunk into the bargain.

_Well, now. This could be a lucky night..._

Garm started heading away from Garrus and towards the centre of the district. Garrus froze in indecision for a moment then hurried after him, ducked into an alley and hauled himself up an old fire escape, trying to muffle the sound of his footsteps as best he could. His mind was ablaze with ways to take down a krogan one-on-one, most of which boiled down to 'don't', but if he could really get the drop on Garm...

He emerged onto the mercifully vorcha-free roof and loped across it, hurdled the two-metre gap to the next building and hurried low along the edge, keeping an eye on Garm's huge form below as he ambled through the narrow streets.

_OK... no armour, but with a krogan and this pea-shooter, that won't matter... all six shots in the brain stem should be enough if I'm close enough, but if he's not a complete idiot he's got a shield generator somewhere on him... might be able to break a few vertebrae if I hit him right..._

As he moved, his hand slipped into his pocket and came out loosely holding his pistol by his side. It would be as effective as most of the lighter military pistols in use at the moment, but without clips and with a cooldown time of twelve seconds per round, he'd have six shots. In any normal firefight, he'd have to make them count. Against a krogan, he couldn't afford to miss.

Another building lay ahead of him, this time a few metres lower down. Garrus jumped, rolled, winced at the loudness of it and bounded to his feet. Garm didn't seem to have noticed; he just walked on through pools of quivering orange light. From here, Garrus could make out every scar on the krogan's crest as a miniature canyon.

Ahead, there was a fork in the road, and the buildings rose higher – too high for him to climb quickly. If he tried to stay on the rooftops, he'd be slowed down too much, and Garm would get further and further into Pack territory. _So it's now or never... what's that song Weaver keeps playing? 'The Final Countdown'?_

With centuries-old synths blaring in his head, Garrus shifted his stride, briefly wondered about the direction his life had taken over the last year, and jumped.

* * *

_Jackie's_ was one of those places claiming a history which didn't exist. The bar was maybe a decade old, but claimed to date back to only a few years after first contact, when there'd been perhaps a dozen humans total on Omega. The air of falsity permeated every aspect of it; the dark, heavy wood supports were, in reality, treated plastic, the clientèle were mostly blowhards and would-be 'hard men' – even the pall of smoke drifting over the sticky table they were sitting at was mostly from e-cigs and dirt-cheap tobacco. Humans dominated; the only aliens in the place were a couple of asari. Turians or batarians wouldn't find a welcoming atmosphere.

"_Oh, the year was twenty-one seventy-eight,"_ someone called.

"_How I wish I was in Constant now!"_ came the answering chorus, and Weaver grimaced. It was the third time tonight he'd heard _The Butcher of Torfan_. He had no doubt that it wouldn't be the last.

Zaeed looked around contemptuously and necked another of his tequila-ryncol shots. "Idiots. There's not a man among 'em who set foot on Torfan."

"I knew a few people who fought there," Weaver said. "All dead now."

The old mercenary chuckled throatily. "Yeah. Sometimes, it feels like I'm the only one who made it out alive that day. I ever tell you about it?"

Weaver shrugged and drained the last of his beer. "Bits and pieces."

"Truth is, that's all I remember. Bloody mess. Thousands dead on both sides, all on some godforsaken little moon."

"Got to be some good stories in there. Aren't there always?"

Zaeed laughed again. "Yeah, true enough. Not much point in living if you don't have some damn good stories to tell when all's said and done, is there?"

"You've got stories enough for a few lifetimes," Weaver said, half-smiling. "Makes the rest of us look bad."

The mercenary cast an appraising eye over him and shook his head. "You're young. You've got time enough for more. Me... I'm an old man. Can't imagine I've got much left in me."

_Bullshit,_ Weaver thought immediately. Zaeed's face was weathered and scarred from decades of violence, but his mismatched eyes still glittered with the same unequalled cold efficiency that had kept the man alive for so long. Even now, sitting in a relatively friendly bar, the mercenary was in a combat suit, making Weaver feel rather uncomfortable about the protection afforded by his worn old leather jacket. _Can't say I blame him, though... any man who's survived a bullet to the head is going to be careful at the least. I'd probably have taken it as a sign, retired to a nice monastery somewhere._

"Ain't about age," he said. "If you've got it, you've got it."

Zaeed gestured at the bartender for another round. "Maybe. It catches up to you, though. All these fucking years of blood and death – loved every minute of them, don't get me wrong, but it wears you down." The shot arrived, and he gulped it down. "Take Torfan. Almost as bloody as Shanxi, but it was just another day at the office for me. Jessie and I had some fun that day."

"They never tell you that part in the history books," Weaver said, beckoning for another beer. "The Alliance likes to pretend it doesn't use mercs."

"Can't say I blame 'em. We're a vicious bunch of bastards, by and large."

Weaver grinned and punched him on the arm. "Ah, you're just a big fluffy kitten under all that armour."

"Kitten," Zaeed muttered, shaking his head. "Listen, kid. Remember the day we met?"

Weaver nodded. "The boarding action on that Eclipse freighter. Maybe two years ago? Back when I was working with Williams." Gus Williams' rosy-cheeked face grinned in his mind's eye for a moment, then fell back with a bullet hole in its forehead.

"Just the three of us left, in the end," Zaeed went on. "And here's the funny thing. I was maybe half a second from gunning the both of you down from behind when I remembered there was a clause in the contract saying that the survivors wouldn't get the dead's shares. That's the only reason you're still breathing, sonny."

Weaver shrugged. It didn't surprise him in the least; Zaeed was a top-class drinking buddy, but he was under no illusions as to just how brutal the man could be. "Shame you couldn't have just killed Williams," he said, trying to make light of it. "Would have saved me a hell of a lot of trouble."

"Yeah, I heard about that," Zaeed said. "Ravi never did know how to pick 'em. Bit him in the arse good and proper. Where'd you go after that?"

"Well," Weaver said, leaning in with an air of exaggerated conspiracy, "don't tell anyone, but I'm Archangel."

Zaeed snorted. "Yeah, and Queen Lydia warms my fucking bed every night."

Over on the other side of the bar, _The Butcher of Torfan _was winding down. The swaying was reaching dangerous levels.

_So here I lay in my twenty-eighth year_

_How I wish I was in Constant now!_

_It's six years past since Torfan fell_

_When I close my eyes I can still see hell_

_God damn them all!_

_I was told the four-eyed scum would see us and fold_

_We'd all come home, or so we thought_

_Now I'm a broken man in a Terminus port_

_So far from Torfan, where I fought_

Zaeed shook his head morosely as the singers wobbled through the last few lines. "Idiots. They sing about their Butcher like she's the fucking plague, but she was just about the only halfway competent soldier I saw that day. I linked up with her unit for an attack on some installation or other, and I'm damned if she wasn't better than me on the day. Lost most of her men, of course, but that was always going to happen in a clusterfuck like Torfan- excuse me a second."

Weaver blinked and looked up, but Zaeed had already moved, sliding to his feet and grabbing a passing man in a crushing headlock, tightly enough that the man couldn't even get a sound out. The conversation faltered for a moment as people noticed the commotion, but as soon as they saw it was Zaeed, business went on as normal. _No better endorsement than that, _Weaver thought, and concentrated on his beer.

"Well, well!" Zaeed crowed. "Martel Vika, in the flesh. Fifteen hundred creds on your head, mate, courtesy of Hailot Greng. Alive, as I recall, not that you'll be that way for long." He nodded at Weaver and started hauling the struggling Vika towards the door. "Good talking to you, Weaver. No rest for the wicked, eh?"

Weaver raised his bottle in salute as Zaeed and his prey disappeared from sight. "No rest for the wicked."

* * *

Once, Garrus had read an article on some news site or other about a krogan who had wandered into a condemned building in a ryncol-induced haze and bedded down for the night. The next morning, construction workers had blown the supports and watched thirty storeys of dilapidated apartment block crash down on itself. It was only in the afternoon that the krogan finished digging himself out and asked if he was on _Idiots Getting Hurt_, the highest-rated regular galactic broadcast among krogan audiences. It hadn't surprised Garrus in the least.

What _had _surprised him was the fact that Garm had four bullet holes in his skull and had been fighting for ten minutes as if he hadn't even noticed.

The gun was lost somewhere in the shadows. Garm's heavy pistol had gone too, kicked out of the krogan's hand and into the garbage piled on one side of the street. As the krogan blasted the wind out of his lungs with a biotically-enhanced punch and sent him flying ten feet backwards, Garrus considered the situation, and decided it wasn't in his favour.

He hit the ground rolling and bounced to his feet, his ribs protesting as he dropped back into his Redek-Astus stance. Garm bellowed something unintelligible but no less intimidating for it, lowered his blood-caked head, and charged.

He was faster than Garrus would have ever thought possible if he hadn't seen him do it to him twice already, and even so he barely got out of the way. As the krogan lumbered past and around, he delivered a kick that would have been fatal to most known life forms even without the enhancement of combat boots to Garm's side, grunting in satisfaction as something crunched – and then hissing in pain as the shockwave danced up his leg like a vertical tsunami, leaving him off-balance as Garm's massive fist came round again. It caught him in the shoulder and spun him like a top, leaving dead nerves behind it.

Garrus staggered back, blood in his mouth from a bitten tongue, and managed to retreat far enough to buy himself a little time to recover. Garm watched him warily from his good eye; one of Garrus's shots had ruined the other, though even now the flesh and viscera were starting to congeal and knit together again. Within a day, the eye would function again.

"Who the fuck do you think you are?" Garm demanded. "Do you even know who I am?"

"Wait, wait, don't tell me," Garrus said. "The Consort?"

Garm came at him again like a biological freight train. Garrus ducked under a heavy blow and landed three solid, knuckle-brusing punches into the krogan's midriff – but four bullets to the head hadn't even slowed Garm down, and this didn't do much more than somehow make him even angrier. The krogan was still slow, though, and when the next punch came his way, Garrus dodged it, grabbed the arm as it flew past his face, wrenched it out behind the krogan and unleashed the best kick he could muster.

Bones snapped under the punishing blow, and Garm roared in pain and rage. Exhilarated bloodlust was flowing through Garrus like a fast, cold river, filling him with a bright, sharp-edged clarity that swept away the muddy remnants of Hyperion beer – _there's just something about the wonderful sound a breaking bone makes, isn't there? - _but Garm caught him with a blind, flailing backhand that snapped his head around and scattered white-hot stars in front of his eyes, leaving the two of them stumbling apart.

"Archangel," Garm growled. "You're the fucking Archangel, aren't you?"

Garrus grinned through blue-stained teeth and spat blood on the ground. "Hey, now. I'm just a concerned citizen."

Garm made some incomprehensible sound in the back of his throat. Then, before Garrus could react to take advantage, he grabbed his broken arm with his good one and, with a rough, grinding crunch, yanked it more or less back into shape. The sound grew louder throughout, climaxing in a guttural, station-shaking roar. Somewhere deep inside the animal instincts of Garrus's brain, hundreds of ancient neurons lit up with primal fear.

"I heal, Archangel," he said at last, baring his own teeth. There was no blood on them; it had congealed almost immediately into great orange scabs that covered his crest like moss on a rock. "Do you?"

Garrus grinned and loosely balled his fists. "Not like you. But then again, I can have children."

"Not when I'm done with you," Garm rumbled, and electric blue biotic energy curled out of his fist. Garrus felt the familiar buzz in the air and threw himself clear microseconds before the krogan's biotic shockwave hit; it caught his feet and spun him in the air, blasting him against a wall. Breath left him in a painful rush, but he had no time to recover; Garm was coming at him again, and Garrus was barely able to clamber to his feet before the next blow came. Somehow, Garm had already recovered enough to use the arm Garrus had broken not a minute earlier – _impossible, _he remembered thinking, _not even a krogan can regenerate that damn fast_ – and Garrus could barely parry the blow on crossed forearms, grunting from the massive impact as his back hit the wall again.

Another punch from the other fist pulverised cheap duracrete where his head had been an instant before. Garrus darted behind Garm as he started to turn and launched himself at the krogan's neck, half-climbing up his back until he could slam his fist down onto that rock-hard, blood-crusted crest, over and over again until Garm managed to rip him away. Garrus skipped past the clumsy counterattack and went for the krogan again, this time with a high kick that caught Garm solidly in the throat, bringing forth coughs and curses – but his assumptions about how much time that would buy were dead wrong, and only a swift parrying action saved his ribs from complete pulverisation.

They came apart again, both panting and wheezing from the fifteen-minute battle. There was pain - narrow, stabbing lances of it whenever Garrus breathed in, a heavy, soft wave of it washing constantly inside his head, a numb, blocky quasi-paralysis in his battered arms – but he pushed it aside, let it fester away in a recess of his mind.

The fight was making him feel more alive than he had in months. There was a peculiar energy singing through him as he faced off against the krogan on the other side of the street, something he hadn't felt since before the mess with Harga. He could happily have stayed there for hours, slugging it out with the krogan, their guns forgotten – but something above him caught his attention, and he realised it was the glint of a vorcha's eye. And another. And a dozen more.

At long last, the rest of the Blood Pack had arrived.

Armed vorcha skidded around the corner at the end of the alley behind Garm, followed by krogan. Suddenly, the rooftops were full of them, some darting between them, their spindly shadows flickering in the orange half-light. For a moment he wondered if they'd been there all along and he'd only just noticed, but Garm grinned and tapped his forearm. _Calling in reinforcements? Low, even for him. And I was having such a nice evening..._

"What now, Archangel?" the krogan said tauntingly, spreading his tree-trunk arms. "What now?"

_I'm going to go with 'run like hell'_, Garrus thought. He didn't have time to say it. He was already too busy running like hell.


	46. Day Of Rest: Guts

**DAY OF REST**

**TWO: GUTS**

* * *

"_With youthful defiance: people try to put us d-down..._"

Luc winced at the elcor's attempted stutter and stared moodily into his empty glass. It had cost about twice what it should have. Just another reason to hate the Spider Bar and everything in it. On an abstract level, he knew it was probably the best place to spend an evening if you didn't want any trouble, but it was packed, noisy, and expensive as all hell. _And full of these damned elcor._

He was sharing a booth with three aliens; Erash and Krul – who Luc had trouble thinking of as anything other than 'the krogan' – as well as Krul's partner, the dour, silent, grey-skinned salarian named Mierin who was apparently better-known as 'the Wall'. Luc had to acknowledge it was an appropriate nickname; he'd seen the two of them advancing inexorably up the street towards the pinned Shurta boys behind an impregnable blue barrier of biotic energy and had watched, impressed and slightly intimidated. He briefly wondered what it would be like to see that unstoppable construct slowly bearing down on you, cutting off your only route of escape.

To his left, Erash and Krul were talking animatedly over the table about results in a sport he knew nothing about. Mierin sat opposite him, but their eyes hadn't met in the hour they'd been there. He doubted he'd exchanged a hundred words with the salarian in the weeks he'd known him; he'd tried, but any questions were met with deflective, barely polysyllabic answers, and he'd never known Mierin to speak unless spoken to. The thought of a salarian equivalent to the autism spectrum wandered through his mind.

"No, no, Ikphion is useless, absolutely fucking useless," Erash insisted, pounding his glass on the table for emphasis. "You see him against the Hammers? Two for fourteen, he shouldn't be on the team with stats like that-"

Krul shook his massive head. "And replaced by who? Caractanus? The Rockets might as well fold now if that's their best hope. They want to ride the season out without relegation and look for new talent in the draft, someone like Morix or Gilirion-"

Luc listened to talk of playmakers and lancers and some untranslatable turian words for a moment, then went to the bar. Ten minutes later, fresh from the thicket of sweat- and smoke-smelling drinkers clustered around it, he returned with a double ruxxia-and-coke to find them still at it.

He sat and tried to look somewhat attentive, but his mind kept wandering, blotting out the music – _alleged music_ – and going back to the vicious battle in the alley, a gleaming bright spot in a dull, grey day.

He'd loved it. He'd loved every second of it, he'd loved every kill, every dead batarian, every spreading blood pool... it all flickered in his mind with a knife-edge clarity, more real than real. He could feel his heart beating faster just from the memories of it, the familiar mosquito whine of biotic energy hot under his skin.

But there were older, darker memories attached to it by fine threads that ran through his skull like fishing lines, their hooks wedged deeply in the past. He remembered seeing batarians dead today, and suddenly-

_Standing alone, breathing hard, pistol in hand, alien blood on his face, corpse at his feet, four eyes staring sightlessly into a ruined sky, smoke boiling angrily over the horizon, shouts and buzzes on the comm line in his ear, white-hot elation at the kill humming inside him, a tiny motor spinning a thousand times a second in his heart, a woman's name on cracked lips_-

He blinked and looked up. Nobody seemed to have noticed anything amiss about him, but he could feel sweat on his brow – not from the heat of room. It was cold. He glanced down at his hand, and he could discern the slightest of trembles in it.

"God," he murmured to himself, and downed half his drink in one gulp. The acid kick of the ruxxia slithered down his throat and started burning a hole in his stomach. The sensation was almost familiar-

_Falling back, uncomprehending, a ragged hole in his belly, biotics failing, rifle dropping from his hands, the batarian who'd shot him collapsing with a bullet in his head, medics crowding over him, injector cold against cold skin, light fading-_

He shuddered. He hadn't thought about that in months, but now his fingers dropped to the neat, circular scar on his stomach. The last battle he'd fought in a uniform, his tour coming to a close.

_Why now? I was past this... I got along with Sensat, more or less..._

The rest of the ruxxia-and-coke followed the first half. The conversation was still going on next to him, but he hadn't been listening at all. They hadn't been paying attention to him either.

Across the table, Mierin raised his head. Their eyes met, and Luc thought for a second that he glimpsed something in the salarian's dark gaze – but it vanished as soon as he saw it, and the eyes went back down.

This time, when he went to the bar, he was in no mood for the crowd. He elbowed his way through, ordered pure ruxxia this time, took one shot there and ordered another to take back, his throat feeling like it was breaking out in angry blisters-

_Smoke in his lungs, his eyes, burning fields and homes and bodies and lives, rubble in place of buildings, sharp screams of jets and repulsors overhead, Elysian fields turned to Tartarus, evac shuttles flashing away into the sky, silver fish darting through rains of fire, his eyes on one, a beautiful burst of orange flame, a shockwave and a scattering of ashes-_

"God," he said again, under his breath, "God damn it..."

He sat down again in the booth, trying like hell to hide his shaking. This time, Mierin didn't look up.

The rest of the night passed the same way, alcohol chasing down memory. He remembered a book, a real book with pages and bright illustrations, one he'd read as a child in his native language, but the name eluded him. He recalled an old drunk sitting alone on a surreal, tiny planetoid, drinking to forget. It wasn't working for Luc.

* * *

"Oh, that's not good!" Garrus shouted to himself and changed direction, his shoes sliding across the smooth metal of the roof. Vorcha were pouring over the side of the building he'd been heading towards, all glinting eyes and bared fangs, and now they were to his side as well as behind him.

He'd fought his way past the first lot, his knuckles still bleeding from the punches he'd thrown, but they'd chased him up another fire escape and onto the rooftops, howling and shrieking behind him like a pack of demons all the way. He couldn't stay there for long; it made him an easy target, and every now and again he had to do _this_-

The jump was heart-stopping, clearing a good ten feet – _and the under-12 long jump silver medal pays off –_ before coming down on another roof about a metre lower down than the first, rolling and scrambling to his feet, jacket ripping on a jagged shard of something or other. His sides were already burning, every breath coming as a painfully hot gasp, but he had absolutely no intention of slowing down.

Ahead of him, on the rooftop he'd planned on jumping to next, a stairwell door burst open and vorcha spilled out of it like angry wasps from a shaken nest. One of them spotted him and started firing from the hip. Vorcha were hardly known for their accuracy in the best of times, but Garrus didn't want to put that to the test. He veered right, ducking down low behind an AC unit, and the assault rifle fire rattled past him. A few squawks and shouts rose up behind him as the wayward fire cut down a couple of his pursuers, and his teeth gritted in a savage grin.

The grin disappeared as soon as he saw what he was heading for. The next building to jump to was a full three or four metres down, and on either side, the street was at least nine away. "Damn it," he grunted, and made ready to jump.

More gunfire crackled behind him as he leapt, pistols and assault rifles and submachine guns all at once, and the air around him filled with incandescent fire. He hung in the air for what seemed like ten seconds, the only thought in his head a niggling voice that maybe it was just a little further down than he'd estimated, and then he landed, breath leaving him with a whump as he rolled and bounced on the hard metal. He managed to shield his head from the worst of it and stumbled to his feet, only slightly disorientated, just in time to see the vorcha start to pour over the same gap, a great rust-brown flood of death coming his way.

_I just wanted a quiet evening_...

Garrus turned and ran once more, slowed by the jabbing pain in his ribs – _don't tell me I've broken another one, I can't have many left now_ – and threw himself flat again as a shotgun blast whistled centimetres above his head. He had no idea how the vorcha had got there, probably scaled the wall from street level while he wasn't looking, but it _was_ there, and it had a shotgun.

He moved with speed he didn't think he had left in him. Before the vorcha could line up another shot, he was on his feet and shoulder-charging it, sending it staggering back with the gun in the air. He made a grab for it and wrenched it out of the vorcha's flailing hands, then levelled it and fired. The vorcha's torso disintegrated, splattering foul-smelling blood across Garrus's face and into his mouth; spitting, he turned back towards the onrushing horde and fired twice more, each shot only hitting a handful but causing chaos as they leapt the gap as bodies blocked bodies and the whole mess tumbled onto his roof in a mound apparently composed entirely of limbs and screeching mouths.

He had no time to admire his handiwork. He wheeled around, shotgun still in hand, and froze in horror: yet more vorcha were on the next roof and heading his way, whooping and hollering and hissing, and somehow, one of them – bigger than the others, taller even than Garrus and with scraps of a mutilated combat suit hanging off it like leaves on a dying tree – was hauling a full flamethrower unit along with it.

A new plan appeared in his mind as suddenly as if someone had uploaded it from a computer, and he turned yet again, this time sprinting for the side of the building. Thick, black rubber-clad power cables hung between the building and the one on the other side of the street, anchored to the roof by little more than a few rivets, and when his shotgun fired one last time, there wasn't even that.

Dropping the gun, he dived for the disappearing, sparking end of the severed cable and just barely got his hands on it above the naked electricity – _now that would be a shocking way to go_, the part of his mind apparently dedicated to making bad puns in lethal situations remarked – and for a moment which paralysed him with vertigo and plain old fear, he was swinging down over the empty street, hoping like hell the other end of the cable would hold.

It held. However, the building rushing towards him told him that perhaps this wasn't the blessing it seemed.

"Crap," he grunted, and let go. He fell ten feet to the street as the cable swung on overhead and landed hard on his back, his head thumping back on the metal with a clang. Purple mist swirled in his head, accompanied by yet more pain.

He allowed himself the luxury of two seconds spent just lying there, cursing the stupidity that had brought him there in the first place, then unsteadily rose to his feet and started running, feeling the blood seeping from a head wound and down the back of his shirt as more gunfire started up, peppering the wall behind him. The vorcha were already swarming back down the wall after him, down pipes and ledges and outcroppings, baying for blood.

_Well, if this keeps up, I won't have any damn blood by the time they get me..._

* * *

Ripper woke up in someone else's bed with a throbbing headache and a throat so dry it was a wonder it hadn't spontaneously combusted at some point in the night. For a split-second, soldiers' instincts propelled him to a half-sitting position, eyes flicking around the darkened room, searching for danger even before he was properly awake. As he sat up, an arm slid off his stomach and onto the bed beside him. He looked down, and with some surprise noticed that it belonged to Preitor Gavorn.

Gavorn mumbled something incomprehensible into the pillow and lay still. Ripper sat there for a moment, still blinking sleep from his eyes, then shrugged and eased himself back down. His head was still pounding. He tried to remember how much he'd been drinking last night and found that he couldn't, which probably translated to 'a lot'.

The apartment around him was spacious, well-furnished, modern. On Omega, that was a rarity. Before Archangel, Ripper had basically lived in a shoebox, so it was with some appreciation that he took in the wide bed, the broad, partly polarised window through which faint streamers of orange light were still filtering, the half-open walk-in wardrobe and the suits inside. Of course, he expected no less from one of Aria's top enforcers, and by the ads he'd seen blaring from transport stations and the flickering billboards covering the city, Gavorn's vorcha extermination business was booming.

_Ah_.

For the last minute or so, he'd been trying like hell to work out _why_ he'd run into Gavorn, and the memory had just surfaced through the dull haze of his headache. He recalled making excuses when Archangel had suggested he go drinking with him and Sidonis – though Ripper would happily have agreed if Sidonis had been out of the picture – and making his own plans. Even before Archangel he'd been trying to find a way into Aria's organisation, and last night he'd managed to corner Gavorn, and – _well, one thing led to another..._

It had been a while. V-33 had always frowned on relations between its members; Ripper had heard stories from the old hands about missions gone wrong and good people killed because someone hadn't been able to maintain objectivity. _And maintain objectivity we did. How many friends left to die when we could have saved them? Ten? Fifteen?_

But that was in the past. _Not far enough in the past. Near enough that I'm still in its shadow. _What mattered was today, and what he'd found out from Gavorn. He waited patiently for those memories to come back.

They didn't.

Slowly, painfully, it dawned on him that he'd managed to drink all the potentially valuable information he'd gathered into oblivion. He groaned under his breath and screwed his eyes shut, massaging his aching temples with one hand. _How did this happen?_

He knew he wouldn't have given away anything about Archangel, he was disciplined enough for that, but it was slightly disturbing how completely he'd failed here. True, he hadn't been drinking like that for a decade or more, but that was no excuse.

_So, this was really just a roundabout way of getting laid._

Actually, put like that, it didn't sound quite so bad.

He grimaced once more and eased himself out of bed, quietly hunting for his clothes in the darkness. The thought of murdering Gavorn had occurred to him, but he rather doubted Gavorn was quite that important to Aria's organisation. _Surely the vorcha problem isn't quite that bad yet._

"Oh, _come on_," Garrus hissed. Yet more vorcha had just emerged from an alley to his right, brown blurs glimpsed through eyes stinging with acrid sweat, and at least half of the ones who'd chased him over the rooftops were still after him.

Another turn, this time forced into a narrow side street, his chest a box of boiling-point wires tightening a little more with each step, the pain worsening and his breath shortening. _Silver medal in the long jump is one thing, but I never was one for the marathon_, an inner voice chirped.

Bullets chipped away at the wall behind him as he cut into the street, closer than they'd ever been before. _Don't they ever get tired, damn it? _He made it through without being blocked off and emerged into another main artery, this time not empty; a few humans clustered in a doorway, a turian noisily vomiting on a corner, a drunken pair of elcor staggering across the street. All this and more flashed through his head in an instant, and then he was haring away down the street. One of the humans shouted something after him. A couple of seconds later, he heard them shouting in panic as dozens of vorcha boiled around the corner like a wave of toxic gas.

There was no time to worry about them, though; all he could do was hope that the vorcha were focused enough on him not to bother anyone else. Which was, admittedly, a lose-lose situation.

He knew he had to get off the main road before he became too easy a target, but the next side street he could take was fifty long, painful, potentially lethal metres ahead of him.

_You know,_ the asshole in his head opined, _this would be a really fantastic way of training athletes._

His lungs were twin cauldrons of fire by the time he was there and there was solid metal between him and the bullets. He had no idea how he was still alive, but he was damned if he was going to object. Here, high cliffs of buildings pressed in overhead, closer together at the rooftops than at ground level, the walls wreathed with cables and pipes and AC boxes which splintered the orange light overhead and cast wild shadows on the grimy floor. He ran, cut down another alley, and another, then emerged blinking onto another empty main street.

At its end, salvation beckoned.

An Eclipse checkpoint marked a lonely door in a wall of metal, four or five yellow-armoured guards standing uneasily around. It was a thankless job watching a district gate on a border with the Blood Pack, and it was about to get a lot worse for them.

He headed their way. At the back of his mind, a voice was airily wondering if they might not just shoot him down now. Suicide attacks on checkpoints weren't unheard of, after all...

"What's the matter, friend?" a salarian guard called mockingly. _Why is that nobody ever calls anyone 'friend' sincerely?_ "I think you're- oh, fuck!"

_And that would be my entourage._

Every muscle in Garrus's body hissed and crackled beneath his skin as he approached the checkpoint. Guns were raised, but they weren't pointed at him.

"What do we do, what the fuck do we do?" a tall, pale human said, staring down the barrel of his Avenger with naked fear in his eyes.

The salarian, apparently their leader, didn't bother to answer. At least, not verbally.

"Crap!" Garrus spat as the gunfire started, ducking down as low as he could while still running. _I have not survived this long with people trying to kill me to get killed accidentally by someone else, damn it!_

Staccato lightning lit up the street and rattled his teeth in his head. His eyes stayed fixed on the gate in front of him. Ten metres. Five.

Nobody tried to stop him from escaping through the gate. In fact, the pale human was already scrabbling to open it, muttering "Oh shit, oh shit" over and over under his breath. It was a heavy, manual metal door bristling with bolts and studded with an archaic wheel mechanism which let out a piercing shriek of metal as it slowly ground open. Garrus darted past the guard and slipped through first, then ran right into the back of another Eclipse guard, a yellow-skinned salarian.

"What the- who are you?" he demanded, turning to face Garrus with rifle raised. Garrus threw up his hands.

"Vorcha, hundreds of them," he babbled, trying to seem as much like a terrified civilian as he could. _Not much of a stretch, really._ "Please, you've got to-" The human guard he'd escaped past barrelled into the back of him, sending all three of them to the deck. Gunfire was still rattling away behind them as Garrus struggled out from the pile and started running again. The other guards let him go. They had bigger concerns.

_Several hundred of them, in fact._

* * *

Sensat was hunched over his desk, scowling ferociously at a dozen screens arrayed all around him, his face bathed in amber light. Melenis knew he was looking for something which wasn't there. Looking for a way out. Looking for a way to save his life again.

Every detail of Melenis's remaining organic fragments was displayed on those screens. If he'd wanted to, Sensat could have counted the number of blood cells in his veins, measured the exact mass of his brain or calculated the precise chemical make-up of his body. None of that would help.

Sensat threw himself back in his chair and glared at the uncooperative data. "I should be able to do this," he snarled.

"Not even the best volus neuroscientist in the galaxy could do this," Melenis said. It might not have been the literal truth, but to give Sensat hope now would be to guarantee he'd never stop looking.

The batarian didn't look round. He stayed there, slumped in his chair, looking as defeated as Melenis had seen him since Deinech. "I'm a fucking genius. I built the most advanced techno-virus ever seen, damn it! Why can't I do this?"

"If it is any consolation," Melenis said, "your modifications and cybernetics are flawless. I would be long dead if not for them. It is that part of me which is irreplaceable that cannot be fixed."

"You're sure? There's never been a case where this has been reversed, or even stopped? Slowed?"

Melenis paused for a millisecond. Volus Neural Entropy Syndrome had been slowed, of course, dozens if not hundreds of times, but treatment had always begun much earlier than the time they had left.

"If," he said slowly, "I had every neuroscientist in Lenos and Talat working to find a way, with unlimited funding, beginning tomorrow... perhaps they could find me three more months. They would not be pleasant months. It is only your cybernetics which allow me to function now."

"So what's going to happen?" Sensat said, voice heavy with defeat. "How long do you have?"

"The longest-lived volus ever died at the age of sixty-nine," Melenis said. "I am sixty-six. I am already in the top two percent in terms of longevity. Very few pass sixty without VNES at least setting in. I was very lucky there; mine had barely begun to manifest when you saved me."

He paused, trying to remember that day. It was all written down, along with the details of every other day since, locked away in the files inside his head, but that was less memory than it was historical records. When he actually tried to remember, there was only confusion, single images rising sharply from the chaos like rocks from the sea. Tablecloths burning. The constant, steady roar of pain from his severed legs. Figures in armour moving through the smoke. His quivering hand, reaching for a dropped pistol. Screams.

"Typically, the most obvious symptoms are loss of control over the body as the links between the brain and spinal cord decay," he went on. "In my case, the direct hardlinks you inserted between my brain and the artificial body you built for me impose limits on how far this can progress. I will still function almost normally, though there have already been declines in my reaction times. Within nine months, however, I will lose access to my long-term memory. Within a year, I will no longer be able to function as an individual. Within eighteen months, I will be brain-dead."

Sensat was silent for a long minute. Melenis waited patiently for him to speak.

When he did, it was in a low, grating tone. "And you're not... afraid? Angry?"

Melenis considered it for a moment. "No," he said. "Why fear the inevitable? Every day I live now is another that I should never have had. My life should have ended in that restaurant, years ago."

"It didn't, though. You saved my life."

"And you mine. You gave me a new life. A better one, I think. This past year, I have felt like I was doing more good than I had in my first sixty."

Sensat let out a long, shuddering sigh. "Thank you. That means... it's..." He trailed off, head still bowed. Melenis knew what he meant.

"I am an old, old man," Melenis said, waddling up to stand behind Sensat. Ten thousand facets of the inner working of his brain spidered across the orange screens in front of them. "I'm tired, my friend. All things end, and they're the better for it."

"Yeah," Sensat murmured. "Maybe, yeah."

"Remind me," Melenis said. He could have checked his memory banks, but this wasn't a question to be asked of ones and zeroes. "Did I ever tell you why I call myself Melenis?"

"No," Sensat said. "But I worked it out."

"Hardly a deep secret," Melenis said. Beneath his mask, a ghost of a smile flickered across his face. "Volus mythology may be obscure, but a few extranet searches put paid to that, I imagine."

Sensat nodded. "Mel Enis. 'The Reborn Soldier'."

"A relic from an unusual northern culture which revered physical violence."

"The legends said he died twenty deaths and stood up again after each."

"And grew tired," Melenis said. "And when he died his twenty-first, he decided not to come back."

"Well, then," Sensat said, forced humour brittle in his voice, "you've got another twenty to go, old man."

Melenis smiled again at that. "I think one will be sufficient."

"There's another thing you never told me," Sensat said, after a moment.

"My birth name."

"Yeah."

"A man must have some secrets."

"Like that, is it?"

"Yes. It is."

Silence.

After ten seconds or so, something tripped the main sensor alert at the front door. Melenis flicked his display onto the camera pointed there, and realised it was Garrus. Bloodied, his clothes half-shredded, dripping with sweat, but Garrus nonetheless.

Sensat noticed as well. "What the hell happened to him?" he muttered, rising from his chair and heading for the stairs down to the main level. "Hey, Garrus! Lose a fight with a blender?"

Garrus leaned back against a wall and slid down until he was sprawled back on the floor, panting. Blood was leaking from cuts on his face and arms, dripping down onto his ripped shirt, and his entire body was coated in a sheen of sweat.

"Hell," he gasped. "I just wanted a quiet night out..."


	47. Mote: Mountain

**MASS EFFECT: INTERREGNUM**

* * *

**MOTE**

**ONE: MOUNTAIN**

* * *

Most cities worked well enough as a two-dimensional map. Omega didn't.

A projection of it hung in the air, occupying most of the free space in the atrium. It towered three metres into the air, high above even Krul, a great mushroom shape outlined in sharp white lines. The interior was an incomprehensible mash of tiny blocks and streets, so small and so many that it hurt just to look at it.

"Tone it down a bit, Mel," Garrus said. "District level."

Most of the lines faded to nothing, leaving a skeletal framework instead. Hundreds of distinct compartments were crammed into not only the main body of the station but also into the long arms trailing down like the tentacles of some venomous sea creature, the last remnants of a mining operation long since replaced by the mother of all black markets. The ancient Core Road was a jagged semi-helix burrowing down through the heart of the station, spine, artery and DNA all at once, splintering into a thousand little capillaries where winding streets broke off and snaked off into the depths of the asteroid's remains.

Looking at it was depressing. Any one of those tiny little enclosures held thousands upon thousands of people drawn from all corners of the galaxy, packed in more densely than in most of the megalopolises in Council space. Occupying, administrating and generally ruling them were dozens of mercenary bands, cartels, syndicates, two-cred warlords – and the queen bitch herself, Aria T'Loak. Opposing them were three turians and three humans, all of whom were apparently competing for the title of 'most dark and troubled past', two salarians at opposite extremes of their species' volatile personality scale, a batarian who'd come perilously close to unleashing two separate genocides in the course of twenty-four hours, a racially-confused krogan and the unholy offspring of a volus and a light frigate.

_Well, nothing's ever easy..._

"OK," he said, trying to sound a lot more confident than he felt when he surveyed the mountain they had to climb. "Butler?"

Butler rose from his chair – which was instantly stolen by Sidonis, who'd wandered in late and hungover and had been left without a seat – and stepped forward, entering commands on his omnitool.

"Here's us." The Gozu/Kima border area flared up in green. "Now, here's the Blue Suns. Core territory in dark blue, more tenuous areas in light." What seemed like half the station was flooded with blue, pouring through dozens of districts up and down Omega's length. The pattern was obvious: the Suns were strongest on the sunward side of the station, their hard core of dark blue surrounded by more tenuous holdings which stretched right up to and past the tiny green patch.

"Fuck me," Weaver muttered under his breath.

"Here's Eclipse."

Another command, and a neat almost-sphere of yellow centred on Zheigun District down near the old industrial sectors appeared. The yellow was uniform, devoid of any variation in colour; every territory the Eclipse controlled was held in an iron fist, and anything they felt they couldn't defend was abandoned. Their territory was maybe half the size of the Blue Suns' miasma, but their strength might even have exceeded it.

Erash frowned up at the map. "I could swear we owned more than that when I was with them."

"We did," Butler said. "They got hit pretty hard by the post-geth downturn in their off-station activities, though. It's one hell of a bear market out there for the quality-over-quantity types at the moment."

Garrus smiled grimly. "Which means that the Blood Pack..."

"Yeah," Butler said, and clicked again. A huge, sprawling cloud of red flashed into existence, in some places as deep and thick as human blood and in others barely more than a light pink shading, with disconnected pockets and enclaves dotted across the station. A collective murmur of apprehension rolled around the room. "And this is probably only a partial picture. These are the best figures I could get, but trying to work out the loyalty or even the numbers of the vorcha is... well, I think I've got it to the nearest hundred thousand. Better than that is..." He trailed off and shrugged.

On the other side of the map, Sensat cleared his throat. "Actually, my figures are somewhat more precise. I estimate a total vorcha population of seven hundred and forty four thousand, plus or minus ten thousand."

Garrus watched Butler's jaw tighten ever so slightly. "Well done. Have you also come up with a practical application for that kind of precision?"

"No," Sensat said. "It's all intellectual."

There was a pointed emphasis on the last word, and Garrus quickly stepped in as Butler's hackles rose.

"OK, OK, kids, settle down," he said. Butler shot him a dirty look but said nothing; Sensat just sat there, smiling faintly. "We can at least agree that there are a hell of a lot of vorcha."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ripper move as if to say something, then apparently think better of it. Garrus waited for a second, but the moment had passed.

"Right," he said, and cleared his throat. "The last major player, if you please."

Butler clicked one last time. A noxious purple flooded across the core of the station, centred on the familiar shape of Afterlife but with tendrils snaking through the innards of Omega to its farthest reaches and back again. The others were at least recognisable quasi-political entities in some shape or form; Aria was more than that. Her organisation was a virus, a cancer pulsing wetly at Omega's heart of darkness. The purple web was horribly reminiscent of scans of a brain in the grip of late-stage Corpalis Syndrome. _And don't I know all too well what they look like._

"We aren't even a mote in her eye," Monteague muttered. Garrus vaguely recognised the phrase from somewhere. _Pressly again? _"Months we've been at this. Months. What have we got to show for it?"

Weaver nodded. "Every fuckin' time we push the bastards out, some other lot of them turns up the next day and sets up shop."

_And if those two are agreeing, you know they've got a point._

"I know," Garrus said, raising his hands to quell any future objections, "I know. That's why we're here. Our fundamental problem is that our strategy never really changed from when it was just me out here. We're focusing on districts and gangs when we should be playing a bigger game."

"Like with Williams?" Erash said. "That hurt them more than anything else we did."

"The failure of that shipment and the subsequent smuggling deficit caused minor turmoil in Terminus stock markets," Melenis chimed in. "The syndicates and mercenaries are so deeply invested in the infrastructure of the Terminus Systems that they have become vulnerable to commerce warfare."

"Surely not the Blood Pack," Krul said. "Eclipse and the Blue Suns are almost legitimate in some sectors, but the Pack operate on a different level."

"Two out of three ain't bad," Butler said thoughtfully.

Garrus frowned, trying to calculate the potential political ramifications of the Blood Pack's relative strength going up. "It could work in our favour, too. If we weaken the Suns and Eclipse – and Aria too, in fact – then we might be able to force them into an unholy alliance against the Pack if they seem like they're becoming too powerful."

"At the risk of handing the keys to the station to the Blood Pack if it goes wrong," Krul grunted. "Don't underestimate them."

"The Pack are more easily destabilised," Sensat said. "Their structure leaves them open to internal strife in a way we could never exploit with the others. For the Suns or Eclipse, it'd be a coup at the highest levels. The Pack, though..."

"Civil war," Monteague said solemnly. "Blood in the streets, heads rolling-"

"Sounds like fun," Weaver interjected, drawing a filthy look from Monteague which he manfully ignored. "Collateral damage won't be too bad as long as we keep an eye on weapons shipments coming in. If we can keep 'em to small arms, a little bit of civil war might just about be the best thing we can do for this station."

"We can't account for every smuggler in the Systems," Erash said. "That's probably something like a third of the population. I mean, who among us can honestly say that they've never smuggled arms?"

Garrus raised a hand, then remembered that it technically wasn't true and guiltily lowered it again. Several of the others seemed to be wrestling with similar dilemmas. _Does it count as smuggling if there's no actual government to prohibit it?_

"Well," Garrus said into the slightly awkward silence, "we have a good shot at locking down the big guns if we use our intel well. But this is all off-topic; even if we agree to shift our focus towards commerce warfare against the Suns and Eclipse, we need concrete plans of action."

"Hey, don't look at us, man," said an indolently grinning Sidonis. "That's your fucking job, _Archangel. _We're the grunts."

_Fantastic. The point of a joint strategy session was that I wouldn't have to do it all myself, you know..._

"Do we have a consensus, then?" Garrus asked, hoping someone would chip in and help out. Instead, there was a general murmur of assent and the sinking feeling of twenty eyes staring intently at him.

"A ringing endorsement," Erash drawled.

Garrus repressed a sigh. "Well, first things first, we'll need to know just what the Suns and Eclipse are getting up to," he said. "We need specifics. A breakdown of their business, hotspots, trade routes, buyers, sellers, depots... find out what's profitable, and then work out ways to screw it up for them. Butler, you know Eclipse from the inside; you work on them. Sensat, look at the Suns."

He waited for someone to tell him he was doing it wrong, or that he was misusing his resources or missing the obvious or any of the mistakes he was convinced he was making, but nobody spoke out. Butler flashed him a thumbs-up and Sensat tilted his head back in acknowledgement, but nobody called him an idiot or questioned his leadership. This disturbed Garrus more than the alternative. _Either I'm screwing up or I'm actually good at being in charge, and I can't decide which is worse._

"Once that's done, we'll hopefully have a decent choice of targets," he continued. "As it stands, we already have a few we've been looking at. If we allow a week or so for the research, that gives us time to realign our focus towards harassment and away from territory wars. I want mercs dead in the street, drug deals interrupted, product destroyed, warehouses bombed, software sabotaged... anything you can think of that would be annoying as hell, you do to them. Quantity over quality for now; we don't want to give them even a moment of peace. If you're heading past a stronghold, fire a few shots at it and run. Anything to make them feel vulnerable, to let them know there's somebody out there against them."

Erash let his boots drop to the floor, one after the other. "Well, since you happened to mention the prospect of bombing something-"

"I keep telling you, we're fresh out of plutonium," Weaver said.

"Lamentable," Erash said, shaking his head sorrowfully, "truly lamentable. But there's a place I've had my eye on for a time down in Cixis, a couple blocks off the Core Road. When I was with the Eclipse, it was where we kept our main servers. Hit that-"

"-and their station-side systems are fucked for the next month or two," Butler finished. "I know the place. I always argued for diversifying, not putting all our eggs in one basket, but if they haven't changed it, that's a hell of a weak spot."

"Then we'll hit it," Garrus said. "Krul, Mierin, head out there this afternoon and give me a recon report. See if it's still active, look for structural weaknesses, ingress points... you know the drill."

Krul's huge head bobbed up and down. Mierin didn't seem to acknowledge that Garrus had spoken, but he'd seen enough of the salarian's behaviour to know Mierin never spoke if silence had the same effect.

Garrus cast an eye over his troops and forced a smile. "And, as for the rest of us... we sharpen our knives."

* * *

It was getting harder. There'd been a time when he might have jumped twice the height, rolled to his feet and hared away down the broad, bustling streets of Kithoi Ward, chasing down damn near anyone who dared to run... but there'd been a time when Vortash had been a young man, when the galaxy seemed a little brighter, when it hadn't hurt to get up in the morning, and he couldn't remember that time very well at all.

It was getting harder, Vortash thought distantly as he dropped towards the unsuspecting vorcha below him. And he'd made the career choice of a man a third his age, and forgone the shining city on a hill of peaceful retirement. Except at the time it had seemed less like a shining city on a hill and more like a grey box to die in, and the young man he hadn't been for decades had hungered for adventure, freedom from red tape and quotas and petty office politics, the chance to deliver the real justice he'd been denied so many times...

It was getting harder, Vortash knew, and it would never get easier again. He braced.

When he hit the ground, the shock of the impact sent quivers through his knees and pain shooting up his legs. He came much closer to falling than he'd thought he would. He kept his feet, though, and levelled his pistol at the vorcha as it turned.

"Evening, Tekboy," he said, masking pain with cocksure confidence. That, at least, he remembered.

Tekboy let out something between a hiss and a snarl. His breath stank of rotting meat and worse. "Old turian dead soon. Then he stop bothering Tekboy."

Vortash grinned. In vorcha, that was almost friendly. "Now, come on. My life expectancy is still better than yours, and the longer you give me shit, the more the comparison's going to start getting embarrassing."

Tekboy hissed again and turned away, staring out into the empty street. The gadgetry that gave him his name clanked and clacked around his neck, great belts of cameras and omnitools and devices which could have been anything from medical equipment to sex toys that winked with dozens of tiny, multicoloured lights in the shadows. _And he wonders how I keep finding him._ "What you want so bad you threaten friend Tekboy?"

"Tekboy," Vortash said severely, "if I didn't point a gun at you, you would rip my throat out and drink my blood. Don't play wounded with me."

"_Nekartacc_," Tekboy muttered. The translator didn't pick it up, but Vortash recognised the word: _true-thing-said _was the closest translation Hierarchy Standard could manage. "Ask question, maybe answer."

Vortash nearly challenged the 'maybe', but he didn't want to spend a moment longer in this neighbourhood than he had to. Tekboy was one of only a few vorcha in the area, but Locont District was riddled with batarian slums. Turians stood out. Standing out was bad for your health on Omega. So was blending in, for that matter.

"A couple weeks ago, Archangel tried to kill Garm," he said. "You remember."

"_Krr. _Long chase, no kill. No meat. No good."

_I'm surprised you got anywhere with all that crap hanging off you. _"Give me the pictures, Tekboy. And don't try to tell me there aren't any. There are. I know you."

Tekboy spat and dug down into his forest of devices. He pulled out an archaic, tooth-sized memory card from one and tossed it over his shoulder. Vortash caught it easily and scanned it with his omnitool. The pictures were there.

"Alright," he said, slightly disappointed. He'd expected it to be harder. It wasn't any fun when they just gave him what he wanted. He didn't feel like he'd got anywhere unless they made it difficult. "Want this back?"

"Keep it. Pictures worthless. Not good enough for _ghoritun_." Vortash had to screw up his eyes and think hard for that one before he realised it was batarian slang translating as _eyes-knower_.

_Not good enough for facial recognition... unsurprising. Not that it would do them much good even if it was._

"Have yourself a good one, then, Tekboy," Vortash said, and started walking briskly away, back to the relative safety of the inner districts.

"Die soon," Tekboy called after him, and then let out a raucous, scraping peal of laughter that echoed between buildings and from the raw rock ceiling overhead.

Vortash got home without incident, unless he counted the shooting pain in his legs from the drop. It had subsided into a familiar dull ache by the time he'd climbed the seven flights of stairs to his apartment – the elevator had been broken since about a week after he'd arrived. He hunted through a medbox for painkillers and found a couple of pills he couldn't identify. He reasoned that, since he had them, he had also previously taken them and not keeled over dead, and swallowed them.

His apartment was upper-mid-range by Omega's standards, which meant that the power and water worked and the windows could be cajoled into opening if he pried at the seal long enough with a carving knife. On the Citadel, it would have been a dump even at the dark ends of the Wards. It was all his pared-down pension could afford; if he'd stayed the last five years and made the official retirement cutoff, he might have been better off – _I wouldn't be on this station, for one thing_ – but he'd made his bed, and was attempting to sleep in it.

That reminded him to make his bed. He cast a weary eye towards the coiled sheets visible through the bedroom door and decided he could live with it.

He dropped the pistol into a desk drawer and slumped into his chair, then booted up his terminal. It had already grabbed the files from Tekboy's ancient data card, leaving them tantalisingly collected on his desktop. A quiet thrill of excitement rippled through him. He'd never seen Archangel's face before; he'd seen the helmet from countless grainy surveillance shots and even in person once, from a long way, and damn near everyone on the station had seen the exponential viral spread of the white-wings graffiti... but what was beneath the helmet was a mystery. The Blood Pack hadn't leaked the images from Tekboy's cameras. Nobody else had seen what lay before him.

The first few images confirmed nothing more than what was known: Archangel was a male turian, probably fairly young. The clothes were nondescript, unremarkable apart from the visible rips and bloodstains. Tekboy's shots were often blurred and distant, though the camera's calibre made up for some of it; Archangel was always in motion, leaping between rooftops, caught in the act of jumps and rolls and skids. Nothing of the face yet.

Vortash glanced at the sidebar. Eight hundred pictures awaited. A minute later he was running freeware face-detection software on the lot, and a couple of seconds after that he had twenty-one shots where Archangel's face was genuinely visible.

He did what he could with them, brightening and sharpening and focusing and colour-correcting, none of which achieved much at all. _CSI: Cipritine this ain't. _He was left with about five good shots. They were still blurred and pixelated, nowhere near the standard C-Sec would have demanded, but C-Sec was in the past. _For both of us._

All he could really extract from the pictures was the colour and shape of the tattoos on Archangel's face. Hardly an unusual type, an incidence of perhaps one in twenty-five or thirty. It was still good enough. He hoped.

With the blown-up, grainy images still on one side of the screen, he opened up his greatest treasure. The audio file was scratchy, faint and at times completely incomprehensible even after he'd paid a thousand credits to an elcor specialist to analyse it, but it was the key to everything: the way to uncover the identity of Archangel.

He played it.

"_-scch not as if I -scchhjob, nothing more."_

The first speaker used a common salarian dialect. Vortash didn't care about him. It was the other speaker his dilapidated directional mic had been aimed at, all those hundreds of metres away. The speaker hidden behind the helmet. Archangel.

"_-scccchhh-could have-other jobs-sccchhh-"_

"_-sccchhhthis economy?"_

"_You do remember- beforescchhhh-the battle-Citadel-scchhh-downturn hadn't even-"_

"_Alright, alrsccchhh-like you ever did-more-"_

"_scccchhhhhhyears with C-Sec-scccchhh-Sarenscchhhhhhh-fought my way- side of the Presidium-sccchhhh"_

And that was it. One unguarded comment picked up by a single stalker on a rooftop halfway across the station with 'borrowed' C-Sec equipment, and Archangel's identity lay open for the taking. An immense stroke of luck, but on such foundations the greatest criminal cases of the last millennium had been built: all you needed was one little break, one tiny clue to set you on your way, and the whole thing would unravel around you...

Before tonight, all he'd known was that Archangel had fought at the battle of the Citadel, and that he'd once worked for C-Sec. So had thousands of others, and with the huge turian majority in C-Sec's ranks coupled with the exodus from the bruised and bloodied Citadel after the geth attack, the records he'd paid yet more thousands of credits to the Shadow Broker's agents for had proved useless. Three hundred turians had quit the force, of whom about half were male. That left a hundred and fifty or so potential candidates for Archangel.

But now he had a face.

His hands shivered a little with excitement as he called up his database. A hundred-fifty faces stared back at him, the familiar overlit C-Sec identity shots arrayed like the world's greatest criminal line-up. The old detective inside Vortash sang with joy at the sight.

Thirty-eight barefaces were the first to disappear. A few dozen with white markings followed; twelve with orange after that. He cut out the greens and reds and golds, and then started removing those with the wrong shade of blue. After that, the wrong shape.

Three were left.

One was fifty-six. Not Archangel.

One was running a private security business on Oma Ker. Vortash called, verified that he was there, then terminated the connection. Not Archangel.

One left. It had almost been too easy. _About time something was.__  
_

Archangel's face stared back at him from the screen with bright, confident blue-grey eyes. Young, well-built, intelligent; everything Vortash had expected. He just hadn't anticipated that Archangel, the man he'd been searching for for months now, was already known to him.

"Well, well," he murmured, and then finally let his face split open into a wide grin. "You've come a long, long way, Officer Vakarian."


	48. Mote: Zeniths

**MOTE**

**TWO: ZENITHS**

* * *

It was a simple plan. Garrus just knew it would go wrong somehow.

The Eclipse server hub was unremarkable from the outside. Another artless block of durasteel and concrete, three storeys tall and sporting no distinctive features whatsoever. In fact, that was perversely distinctive in the area; Cixis was an area given over to cut-price electronics stores and what seemed like an outlet for every subculture and ethnic group within the uneasy mix of turians, batarians and salarians who dominated the district. The melange of hundreds of mysterious foodstuffs still hung in the air long after the arbitary night-cycle had begun, batarian spices mingled with Kolithian flatmeats and the ubiquitous sweet scent of salarian cuisine. The buildings were adorned with bright neon signs and painted shop-fronts, coloured glass and flickering holograms, a few of which were still smiling and beckoning to empty streets. The server hub was different; it was just a block, which might as well have translated to a big sign over the door reading 'NOTHING TO SEE HERE, GO ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS'.

Krul and Mierin's recon had confirmed Butler and Erash's assertion that the place was minimally staffed by a handful of techies. In eight hours of observation, only one salarian had left, and then only to pick up a lhusi from a place down the street. Krul had solemnly reported that he'd been wearing a _Nekyia Corridor_ t-shirt. Somehow, it didn't seem like they were up against the cream of Eclipse's crop.

But it was still going to go wrong. It was a fact of the universe. The easier things seemed, the more convoluted and difficult they would inevitably become.

_Nothing's ever easy._

Garrus was dressed in dark civvies rather than his regular combat suit. The clothes let him lean back against an alley wall and disappear into the darkness as efficiently as a high-end cloaking suite would have. People could have walked right past him and not known he was there.

"The target is approaching," Melenis said quietly over the comm line. "Two hundred metres."

"Acknowledged," Garrus murmured.

The target was an Eclipse operative carrying some kind of vital component to the hub. Butler and Sensat's combined efforts had hacked into the hub's heavily protected outgoing extranet connection, spelling out every little thing exchanged between the hub and their superiors – the most important of which had been the fact that something had broken in an important system nestled somewhere inside.

In his left hand he held an injector, filled with a smart drug cocktail Sensat swore up and down would identify the species of the injectee and use only the appropriate chemicals to knock them out. Garrus wasn't entirely comfortable with it, especially since he was fairly sure the mixture was a personal variant of the batarian's old ADAPT system, but he had to admit it would probably be safer than physically knocking out whoever came along. Salarian brains reacted particularly badly to blunt force.

It wasn't a salarian who came, however; it was a gangly, dark-skinned human, whistling tunelessly to himself. A nondescript plastic case hung loosely from one hand.

Garrus detached himself silently from the wall and ghosted after the Eclipse man, matching his footsteps to the target's to mask their sound, closing in-

When he grabbed hold of the man, he dropped the case in surprise. Garrus pressed the injector up against his neck and listened for the telltale hiss that signified delivery.

"When you wake up, tell them it was Archangel," he whispered into the man's ear. A second later, the man slumped back into his arms, and Garrus hauled him back to the alley and left him unconscious in a doorway.

Butler emerged from a nook across the alley and glanced down at the unconscious human, something like concern on his face. "I think I knew that guy. Sure he won't be robbed or murdered or something here?"

Garrus tossed him the box containing the part and stooped to retrieve the helmet he'd stashed among the garbage. "No."

* * *

The technician was feeling pretty good about his lot in life. He was twenty-seven, a product of Omega's streets and the son of some of the very first human settlers on the station, and he'd managed to avoid being sucked into the brutal gang warfare plaguing it. In fact, people with his skill set were in high demand even in this stuttering economy.

Just a few months ago he'd been contracted to a major arms dealer, which was a hell of a thing to put on his CV. It had also been among the more harrowing experiences in his life. Gus Williams' wintry smile was a hard memory to shake, and every now and again the technician made a point of taking a moment to earnestly thank whatever gods might be listening that he'd made it out of the _Hailfire_ alive. In fact, things had picked up even more from there; working for the Eclipse, he made more than the average salary for his sector in Council space, and it was all tax-free.

In fact, it scarcely qualified as work; he was just there to maintain the top-of-the-line systems and patch the software which held together the syndicate's station-wide comms network. That took maybe a couple of hours a day. The rest of the time, he spent sitting around with Oraim and Valley, watching pirated films projected onto the matte-black side of the server bank and gamely trying to get into Valley's pants. It was a good life, and the technician was entirely content with it.

When the knock at the door came, he was watching Oraim destroy Valley at _N7: Code of Honor_ for the fifth time that day, grinning at Valley's increasingly angry profanity.

"You can go get that, asshole," she said through gritted teeth, without looking around.

The technician shrugged and rose from his favoured indent in the frayed old couch they'd hauled up there a few weeks ago. The delivery of the new processor was pretty much exactly on time, so he didn't think to run any of the more stringent security checks he could have. Nobody apart from management ever came to see them. Nobody else even knew they were there.

He called up the feed from the camera over the door onto his omnitool. The guy standing there had the case in his hand, though the technician didn't recognise him. There was no wonder in that; Eclipse brought in new blood every day. _And we lose just as much. That vorcha attack last month alone killed what, twenty?_

He slid back the panel and peered out through the slit.

"What's the password?" he demanded.

"Password," the man outside repeated blankly. He looked to be somewhere in his early thirties, though his hair was already streaked with grey.

"Yeah. You know, a password?" The technician couldn't keep a hopeful note out of his voice.

"Nobody told me about a password."

"Well," the technician said lamely, "there's a password."

"What is this, a fucking treehouse? 'No girls allowed', that kind of thing?"

The technician flushed. "This is an important facility for-"

"Look, do you want this thing or not?" The courier held the box up and shook it. The component was probably insulated, but the technician still winced.

"They were meant to give you the password," he said doubtfully. "Basic security, you know?"

The man rolled his eyes and jabbed a finger at the technician. "Look, either you open this door and take your goddamn circuit board or I go back to Captain Gurios and tell him he can't play _Galaxy of Fantasy_ on his off hours because some idiot in Cixis was playing hard to get. Your choice, friend."

The technician relented at the mention of Gurios and opened the door. Gurios was one of Jaroth's top lieutenants, apparently chosen for his sadistic streak so wide that the rest of him might more accurately be described as a non-sadistic streak, and the technician had absolutely no intention of crossing him.

He stepped out to take the box, and somebody punched him very hard in the side of the head. This hardly seemed fair, he reflected as he lay stunned on the ground, blood and drool trickling down his slack face. People were stepping over him and dragging him with them, back through the door. That was helpful of them, he thought, and tried to thank them. Instead, he threw up down the front of his shirt and passed out.

He woke up in an alley wreathed in flickering orange light, a foul taste in his mouth and a savage drum-beat of pain thumping in his head. There was smoke in the air.

The hub was on fire and in ruins, its walls crumbling even as he watched as the flames inside roared higher. Broken machinery fizzled and sparked in the depths of the inferno. The roof was bent up and out by what looked like an explosion, and twisted scraps of metal and concrete dust littered the alley.

He dragged himself upright and spat weakly on the ground. "Ah. Fuck. Fuck."

"Oh, good," Oraim said, in a voice which, contrary to the content of his statement, did not seem to be the voice of someone who thought anything was good at that particular moment. "You're alive. You can tell management why you let the bastards in through the front door, then."

The salarian looked unharmed, but Valley was hunched over and cupping a bloody nose next to him. The technician blinked stinging smoke out of his eyes and put his head in his hands. A steady beat of pain was stamping a steel boot on his brain every half-second or so, and the sharp stink of vomit on his shirt, which was sticking revoltingly to his chest, wasn't helping.

"Take this to your bosses," a turian said. The technician raised his head to see him standing there, clad in a strange combination of nondescript dark clothing and a navy blue military-grade helmet, half-silhouetted against the orange roar of the fire behind him. "This is the start. There will be more. We will not be so merciful the next time."

"Fuckin' asshole," Valley growled, her voice thick from her busted nose. "Do you know who the fuck you're messing with?"

The turian cocked his head. "Do you?"

"Archangel," Oraim muttered.

"Yes. Tell your people: we're coming."

_Oh, no,_ the technician thought, _not you bastards again..._

Archangel turned and walked away down the alley, stepping over a body the technician vaguely recognised. He raised a hand over his shoulder in sardonic salute. "A storm's coming, boys and girls," he called. "Better batten down the hatches."

The three of them sat in sullen silence for a little while as Archangel disappeared into the shadows, a silence broken only by the crackle of the fire and the scrape and crunches of their hub's ruined interior slowly collapsing.

"That's it," the technician said eventually. "I'm getting the hell off this station."

* * *

It really was amazing, Garrus thought. Nothing had gone wrong. For the first time in living memory, something had been easy.

He stepped out of the shower and reached for a towel. There wasn't one. He ended up fishing dirty clothes out of the pile by his bed and drying himself with them, but even that wasn't enough to dampen his spirits. It had worked! For what seemed like the first time, they'd come up with a simple plan and executed it perfectly. It was an immense load off his shoulders; he'd been hauling around an immense fear of everything going to hell every time he took the lead, and the tangible confirmation that they could get something done without a hitch was like breaking through a vast psychological wall inside his head.

Sensat and Butler were poring over complete copies of all the Eclipse records they'd been able to pull from the computer banks, another major achievement. In a few hours, they'd know a hell of a lot more about the mercenaries' structure and day-to-day business operations, and it was with genuine glee that Garrus was daydreaming of all the high-value targets intel like that would open up. It was a feeling he'd been missing since they'd taken down Williams: the sense that they'd made a significant difference, that they'd taken a firm stride forward rather than scrambling just to stay in the same place.

It was almost like a drug. He'd been deep in the pits of withdrawal after Kron Harga had slipped away with ninety-two murders committed purely as a taunting farewell, had been lifted by the slaughter of the Shurta Foundation only to sink back as he realised that all they'd accomplished was to make the Blue Suns even more powerful... but _this_, this was a rush he'd been missing. Not as high as Williams, not as high as the few short moments between Deus and Golf, nowhere near as high as the mighty peak he'd straddled with Saren's body at his feet at the heart of the Presidium... but it was a peak, and he planned to savour it while he could.

Garrus sat down on the bed, still naked, and hooked into the extranet via the omnitool on his nightstand. He'd taken to monitoring everything he could find relevant to Archangel, especially on the local intranet: independent news sites, message boards, social networks and even the propaganda wings of the big syndicates running the station were among his bookmarks.

He flipped through some of them, looking for reaction to the attack on the server hub. Across the social sites, on CrowD and Galnet and Flashee and YouWorld, he watched dozens of updates pop into existence per second.

_fire in cixis – Archangel?_

_Holy shit just heard something go boom _|_Cixis_| |_Omega_| |_Archangel_|

_hearin word that archangel took down some eclipse hangout! lovin it!_

_Eclipse site just went down! looks like ARCHANGEL f'ed their systems_

_ARCHANGEL... TAKIN THIS STATTION BACK 1 DEAD MOTHER FUKKER AT A TIME..._

Garrus grinned and moved on to the blogs. _Archangel Report _was statistically in the top 100 most-visited sites from the Omega intranet, no mean feat considering the sheer amount of porn it was contending with, and it had apparently got wind of the events in Cixis faster than any of its competitors.

_**THE ARCHANGEL STRIKES AGAIN... **_was the headline, superimposed in plain text over an image of the ubiquitous white-wings graffiti that had spread across Omega like a virus. Below that, in smaller print, was **_VIGILANTE IN STUNNING ASSAULT ON ECLIPSE STRONGHOLD..._**. Whoever ran the site was apparently convinced that Archangel was just one person, and tended to aggressively exaggerate any hint of a story to appeal to the sensationalist market – _and overuses ellipses _- but half a million people on the station read it regularly. _They say there's no such thing as bad publicity..._

Omega's independent news sites were guerilla operations, run from unknown locations by unknown editors. The good ones were, at any rate, the ones willing to criticise the gangs and syndicates; those that tried honesty without concealing their writers' identities were prone to harassment, arson, murder and everything else their enemies could conjure up to hurt them. There were five operating openly, all under the protection of one of the four major groups; Aria controlled _Omega Today _and the _Times of_ _Terminus_, the Eclipse had _The Omega Inquirer _and _The Keeper of Secrets_, while the Blue Suns' viciously partisan, Hegemony-style _The Omegan _rounded out the list. The Blood Pack didn't bother with publicity. Garrus suspected this was because they couldn't actually read.

In a perverse way, the sites averaged out to be somewhat reliable. At least two thirds of them were willing to report honestly on any given entity, though editorial directive pushed them towards tabloid condemnation of their foes while they sang the praises of their masters. The _Inquirer_ wasn't reporting on the events of the night, but the _Keeper_'s page obstinately refused to load.

Of the true independents, most had picked up on the story and were running it as a headline, though some pushed it down below coverage of the first ever raloi diplomatic delegation arriving at the Citadel. A dozen message boards and newsgroups dedicated to Archangel were exploding, their users driven into a frenzy by the tangible evidence of another blow struck against the gangs. Garrus watched them excitedly debate for a few moments, then logged out and sat back, thinking.

Archangel was the hottest cultural phenomenon Omega had ever seen. It was the ultimate fulfilment of ten thousand revenge fantasies, a hundred thousand bitter somebody-should-do-somethings, a million little vendettas and grudges against the criminal rulers of the station. It was a symbol, an icon, a flag to wave for people who had nothing. Archangel had achieved little, but what mattered was that it _appeared_ to be striking great, heroic blows for justice and people power and any atrophied ideal that would have them. It was as if the hatred and fear of the evils of Omega had built up for decades behind a vast, featureless dam while the station's masters sunned themselves in pleasure barges below, and all Archangel had done was to remove a tiny fragment of a single brick in the great, unforgiving wall, and the first droplets were squeezing through the hole...

_A mote in their eye._

Sometimes, he caught himself wondering. Wondering if what he was doing had an end.

On a realistic level, he knew it was a path to certain death, that he was leading his men to their doom. But sometimes, just now and again, often from the highest peaks but sometimes from the despairing nadirs, he caught flashes of a different future out of the corner of his eye. A towering crystal fantasy of a future, a ridiculous, impossible dream; he would imagine a great popular awakening, uprising, revolution, justice for the dead and living alike, the punishment due meted out to the tyrants and murderers, a future where he could hang up his rifle and take off the helmet and _breathe_...

But the instant he tried to focus on that precious glimpse of the future, it all faded away, and left him with nothing but a long, bloody march to perdition.

A sound emanated from his omnitool, and he sat up with a frown. It was very familiar, but he couldn't quite place it. It was something he hadn't heard for months and months, and when he identified it, a sense of distinct unease set in.

The disused, dust-gathering icon of his C-Sec email account was blinking. He opened it.

* * *

_**To: **vakariang13 _

_**From: **(address unknown)_

_**Subject: **How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?_

_Garrus,_

_I'm concealing my identity from you for now, simply to be safe. You can analyse it if you like, but you'll just trace it back to a junk account. You might have guessed by now that you and I are acquainted already._

_I will not be explicit. I will simply say this: I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what you've been up to since your resignation, and I'm happy for you; you've found a purpose most of us can only dream about._

_I want to meet. Attached is a heavily encrypted file, but it seems your people are good enough to unravel it. Inside is a time and a place. I will be alone and armed only with a pistol (hey, it's Omega. I'm hardly going to come completely unarmed.) Bring whatever backup you want. There will be no ambush, no trap, no bomb, etc etc._

_I have made no arrangements to disseminate the information about your present activities I have uncovered in the (unlikely, I hope) event that you simply kill me to keep your secret. You have only my word to rely on, but believe me, I have no interest in putting an end to your escapades. In fact, I'd like to help._

_Signing enigmatic letters with 'A friend' is a little clichéd, and I'm not sure if it's the literal truth. Let's go with:_

_A like-minded individual_

* * *

Garrus read it once, quickly, then again and again, his dismay mounting with every word. There was no doubt. Somebody knew. Somebody had the power to make it all come crashing down. Even if just the knowledge of his identity leaked, Archangel might survive – but how hard would it be to find a few more Vakarians?

For a moment, hare-brained plans to send his own family into witness protection flashed through his head. That was panic thinking, but the self-centredness of uprooting his family to save his own enterprise struck him seconds later and added guilt to the fear.

He sat there for an hour, thinking. If whoever had sent the email really wanted to bring him down, they were doing it all wrong. If Garrus had been doing it, he would have held off until he had guns trained on every loved one he could find and _then_ sent the email along with proof. That would have put a stop to Archangel very, very quickly. More than that, the letter was from someone who knew him from C-Sec; those email addresses were meant for internal communications only, and he'd never used it for anything but work.

He would have to meet with the sender either way, but all the signs pointed to the email being real, that whoever had written it genuinely wanted to help.

_And what_, the poison voice in his head whispered, _if you're wrong?_

He had no answer to that.


	49. Mote: Fire

**MOTE**

**THREE: FIRE**

* * *

True to his word, Vortash carried only a pistol. He'd carried it for decades. It was a perfectly-maintained old Mark 1418, a relic from the days C-Sec ran their own gun labs and came out with internally-developed weapons, and it was the finest piece of work he'd ever seen. It would fire thirty-six shots with a power of 0.33 and a fire rate of 0.765 on the Limix scale before it overheated, numbers which subsequent models duly surpassed – but none of them came close to the aesthetic elegance of the Mark 1418, the compact, swept-back grey sleekness of it, the sureness of the cross-patterned grip under his fingers, the thick, solid sound of its fire, the thud of the recoil, as familiar as an old friend.

Vortash had seen trends come and go all his life, and had been unmoved by them. He was a sturdy, weathered rock in the river of the times, and it seemed to him utterly ridiculous to swap his trusty pistol for a newer model which ran out of shots a great deal faster and required bulky quasi-ammunition. The new way had no class. It was the product of an obsession with power and a parallel terror of being overpowered, two things Vortash had never had much truck with. He had kept his Mark 1418 ever since he'd lost his last one in a fistfight with a salarian mugger in Kithoi all those years ago, when he'd been a younger and brasher man, and he was hardly going to surrender it simply because the times had moved on without him.

He remembered a conversation with another officer, a fresh-faced turian whose vigour made Vortash feel even older than he already was. It had been just a few years ago, well before the geth and the advent of thermal clips, but long after the last gun press in C-Sec HQ had been shut down, ostensibly because of its cost and actually because the arms companies were sick and tired of being outdone.

"I don't get it," the officer had said. "The Brawler fires more shots, they're half a point higher on the Limix scale, and its fire rate is identical. It's just a better gun."

Vortash had smiled. "Listen, kid," he'd said, "the first time I held that gun, Zellae Corosthis was Primarch, nobody had ever heard of humans, Perria Maray was still hot and Hunters fans still thought they could win the title. You weren't alive. The drell resettlement was only just stabilising. The Screaming Pyjacks were top of the charts. The idea of remaking the _Gamma Ray_ trilogy was ridiculous. Krogan were ripping their skin off to sell it for leather; the market was exploding just because Terea T'kola wore krogan boots on stage." At that moment, as they stood there by the vast plas-glas window, the white ziggurat of the _Destiny Ascension _hadponderously floated past, its engines burning a brilliant blue. Vortash pointed to it. "And _that_, kid, was in spacedock over Thessia, and it was going to be the biggest dreadnought ever built. No _Immortal_, no _Henovax_, no _Harsh Winter._"

"No extranet," the officer had intoned gravely. "The Protheans still ruled the galaxy, turians hadn't evolved yet, Palaven hadn't yet congealed from its component molecules-"

Vortash had aimed a lazy swipe at his head, which the younger man nimbly dodged. "Hey. I'm not _that_ old, you little bastard."

But at times it felt like he was. There was only so long you could stand still in a raging river before it carried you away – or worse, wore you down and smoothed you out until all he'd valued about himself was weathered into nothingness. He'd run the Citadel Marathon in two hours once, edging into the top hundred. The certificate was still hanging on the wall of an abandoned apartment in Kithoi. He doubted now if he could finish it at all. He wanted to be the young Vortash again. In his mind, he still was the young Vortash, cruelly ripped away from a body at its peak and forced into this, this – _husk_.

Back then, though, there'd been some spring in his step yet.

"This gun," he'd said to the officer, "is better than either of us. It's better than your piece. In a hundred years, when we're dead, and maybe buried if we're lucky, the Brawlers won't fire. You know the cooling mechanism in that thing uses frizium instead of cerronite just because it's a couple of millicreds cheaper per kilo? Worthless in the long run. The 1418, on the other hand... it'll outlast us. Hell, it's got power for three hundred years. Might be it'll outlast the Council. We're due another crisis, I reckon."

The officer was examining his own pistol with interest. "Think about the here and now, though. What use is a weapon with inferior specs? It might last longer, but..." He trailed off and shrugged. "I won't be using it by then."

"Kids today," Vortash had muttered. "No respect for staying power."

Staying power was the wrong term, he decided. There was no power in longevity. All it represented was a slow enervation of all the vitality of his younger years. Power measured in terms of how far the decline had been arrested was no power at all.

A hint of movement on a rooftop a couple of hundred metres away to his left caught his eye, and he smiled thinly. His body was decaying, but his eyesight had always been unmatched. It was a sniper, hunched over a long rifle which, he imagined, was aimed squarely at his head. Vortash waved to him.

He was standing alone in the middle of the flattest rooftop he'd been able to find, unobscured by AC units or irregular shapes that might have been used as cover. It had to be completely obvious that this was no trap. _Which means it has to be nice and easy to shoot me in the head. _If Vakarian was smart, and Vortash knew he was, then he'd have at least three or four snipers covering the roof from every side.

A few minutes passed. Vortash stood there, uneasily shifting his weight from one aching leg to the other. He guessed that Vakarian was setting up a perimeter, making sure there were no nasty surprises waiting for him. It was all admirable caution, as he'd expected, but he was beginning to wish he'd brought a folding chair.

Finally, a blue-white light hummed in overhead, and a nondescript skycar set down on the opposite side of the roof. Three people got out: two turians, one of whom was Vakarian – the other was a young bareface in sleek combat armour – and, to Vortash's surprise, a volus. Well-honed eyes noticed strangely stilted movement from the diminuitive alien, almost mechanical. He filed it away for later.

The volus stayed with the car. The bareface stayed twenty metres or so back from Vakarian – _close enough to intervene, though_ – while Vakarian himself came striding forward to meet him. Vortash let him come.

He remembered Vakarian well enough. He'd been only one of a horde of young faces in the ranks of C-Sec, though more driven than most – but there was something qualitatively different about him now. He was wearing the same combat armour he'd always favoured, blood-blue and strong without sacrificing mobility, though it seemed that he carried it differently. Vakarian walked taller than he had before, youthful urgency compressed and honed into purpose, brashness into boldness, and when he came close enough for Vortash to see his eyes, he was struck by the quiet resolve he saw there. He saw no flash of recognition in them, and for a moment he wondered if Vakarian had forgotten him entirely.

Vakarian came to a stop eight feet away and glanced down at Vortash's hip. "Give me your pistol."

It was a command, though not an arrogant one; after a moment, Vortash acquiesced, slowly drawing the weapon with one hand before tossing it to Vakarian. The other man caught it and held it up to the dim light, watching the orange wash over it and through its features. The sight of it reminded Vortash of long evenings spent watching the sun slowly set in the Akasha Canyon on his native Digeris.

"C-Sec Mark 1418," Vakarian said eventually. He tossed it from hand to hand, testing the weight. "Yeah. Fantastic condition, as well. There are probably collectors out there who'd pay top credit for a piece like this."

Vortash nodded. "Probably."

"You know, I remember a man with a gun like this." Vakarian flipped the gun round in his hand so that the grip was facing Vortash and held it out. Vortash took two slightly hesitant steps forward and took it, holstered it. "We used to laugh at him. Old man Vortash, still using an old shooter like that. We used to say, maybe he still cooks with an open fire, maybe he thinks the Unification War is still on." Vakarian's cold blue-grey eyes fixed on his own, one glinting behind his visor. "We used to say, maybe he was there when C-Sec started, telling people how much better things were just a few years ago. Because we couldn't really conceive of a C-Sec without him, you know?"

"Neither could he," Vortash said.

"But he was a good detective. A _very_ good detective."

"Top ten, at least."

"So good he knew things he really wasn't meant to know."

Vortash shrugged. "He just followed his instincts."

"Instincts that could very easily get him killed."

Vakarian's eyes were unchanged, as was the intensity of his gaze. Vortash held it, and judged he would survive the night. _Just a hunch._

"Thing is, though," he said slowly – _and I was having such fun talking about myself in the third person_ - "I don't think they will. Not today, at least. And I don't just mean because you can't be sure I haven't got some kind of dead-man's-switch that'll beam your face all across the station if you put a hole in my head."

Vakarian cocked his head. "Do you? Purely as an academic point, you understand."

"No." Vortash thought about it for a moment, then added: "Although I could still be lying. It wouldn't matter, though. See, I remember you too."

Vakarian said nothing. Vortash breathed in and ploughed on, hoping he had it right. _Because if I don't, and he's not the man I thought he was, then it's an unmarked grave on the edge of the galaxy for me. 'Course, that's likely anyway._

"You're better than that," he said. "You might have been talking about me behind my back, but we were all doing the same to you. It was cases like Kishpaugh and Saleon. Raganis and the M'goli twins. The ones you couldn't close without stepping outside the rules. We could hear the shouting matches between you and your father all the way through headquarters."

Vakarian smiled ruefully. "You could, huh? Nobody ever told me that. I always kind of assumed his office was soundproof."

"I've seen a lot of types on the force in my time," Vortash said. "You get some who do it for the pay and the benefits, some who do it because they didn't really have many options and just treat it like any other job... some who're in it for the power, for kicks, and they're the worst fuckers under the sun. But I always had you down as one of the annoying little bastards who always try to do the right thing. Crusaders, you could call them. And murdering me isn't up your street." _I hope._

Vakarian stared at him for a long few seconds, then inclined his head. "No. It's not. But I have to ask: if I'm a crusader, what are you?"

Vortash grinned. "Ah, that's an easy one. I'm a seeker. It's the thrill of the chase that gets me. I'm the guy who digs where he shouldn't because he _knows_, he knows deep in his brittle old bones that there's something hidden just out of sight, a thread that he can grab onto and just pull, and the whole thing comes crashing down. Then he gets to stand in the wreckage while the whole world rushes around in a panic, and he gets to say 'I told you so'. That's me."

Vakarian was smiling too now. "I think I know the type."

"Sound like something you could use?"

"Yeah," Vakarian said. "It just might."

Vortash stood there for a moment, grinning like an idiot. Just for a moment, he felt like a young man again.

"It's funny," he said eventually, once he'd got his facial muscles under control. "I never expected to see you again."

"Small galaxy."

"Not really. There's something about Omega. It's like..." He groped for the words. "Like a black hole. Everyone who cuts loose and heads out into the galaxy at large... the pull's always there, for one reason or another."

"And what was yours?"

Vortash shrugged. Vakarian's cool, steady eyes watched him unerringly. "You."

"So I'm a black hole inside a black hole?"

"Something like that."

"Well," Vakarian said, "there's a ringing endorsement." A troubled look ghosted across his countenance and vanished so quickly Vortash was scarcely sure he'd seen it at all – but he was sure, and it worried him in turn. It was the first crack to show in the steely exterior Vakarian had presented to him thus far. Vortash had expected more. The kid – _no, a man now, _he corrected himself, but it was a habit he'd never kick; he still thought of forty-year-olds as 'kids' – was young, and all the myriad insecurities and confusions of youth had been present and correct the last time the two had seen one another, shortly before the geth attack. It seemed unlikely that all of them had been washed away inside little more than a year. For a few moments, Vortash had almost believed just that. The little flash of vulnerability, though... somehow, that worried him far more than it would have had it been far more obvious.

Vakarian was still young, and youth was a strength and a weakness. Vortash wondered how Vakarian felt about his endeavour. Had it ever been planned like this? He had men with him, snipers on rooftops, undoubtedly a few more concealed here and there; every report of Archangel's activities swore he had no less than ten men. For a man like Vakarian, that was a lot, and that flash of anxiety he'd witnessed just now was proof it might just be too much. _That_ was the advantage of age: bones went brittle and muscles evaporated, but the mind ensconced itself deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of knowledge and cynicism and observations that might pass for wisdom at a distance. Vortash's mind knew what was what, and a lifetime's detective work meant a split-second's expression could tell him more than any written report.

"Why would you leave, though?" Vakarian said after a moment. "That's not you. You _were_ C-Sec, more than any of us ever were. I can't imagine you leaving."

"Neither could I. But..." Vortash shrugged. "It wasn't C-Sec any more. Not my C-Sec, anyway. You remember what it was like after Saren. We weren't the police any more, we were... peacekeepers. There wasn't much use for detectives. These last few decades, it was all the same in the end. I mean, you had the humans show up, but that didn't change much until Shepard. It was the same job, the same rhythm. More like a symphony, actually. We all had our parts, and I was happy to do mine... and then someone tears up all the sheet music and breaks all the instruments and shoots the conductor. You can't put something like that together again the same way. C-Sec isn't what it used to be. I- well, I'm not a racist, but the human influence isn't helping. Everything's getting politicised, the Council's pushing for more direct involvement in C-Sec affairs, the Spectres aren't playing ball, the red tape's worse than it ever was-"

"Yeah," Vakarian said. "I remember."

Vortash shook his head. "It's not my C-Sec. Not any more. They tore it all up and put it back together wrong. And the Citadel's not what it was. You remember the way it was just after the attack? Firestorms in Zakera, thousands buried under debris, atmosphere malfunction in a hundred places, bits of fleet raining down for days, isolated geth hunter packs roaming the underworks, looting across the station, personnel and materiel at less than half what they had been when the job was five times harder. It was a damn nightmare. Maybe it was selfish to go when I did, when things were in pieces, but I..." He broke off and shrugged helplessly again. "There's things you can't fix, you know?"

Vakarian smiled again. "I think we're the litmus test for that here. If there's anything impossible to fix in this galaxy, it's Omega."

"The world without law," Vortash mused. "Hm. Even in the darkest days, right after the attack, it was never this bad on the Citadel."

"But there's something different here. A spirit of... liberty, I suppose, with all the good and all the ill that brings." Vakarian's smile had faded, the thoughtful, faintly melancholic expression replacing it. It was the face of a man twice his age or more. "There's no law. Nothing to protect the people here, but nothing to hold us back."

Hard steel glinted behind Vakarian's eyes with the last few words. Vortash had no doubt that he meant it. There were rumours of the terrible vengeances Archangel had wreaked on the criminals of Omega, most too horrible for even the most twisted salarian horror movies. Vortash had dismissed most of them out of hand, and had been sure almost all were fabrications when he'd learned Archangel's identity and recalled the impetuous but well-meaning officer he'd known. With that pitiless flash, he began to wonder.

"The fact is," Archangel said – _Archangel? Vakarian, of course, but was that his voice? _- in a tone somehow both softer and more determined, "here, we are the law. And when we can deliver justice, we do it. We don't wait for approval. There's nobody holding paperwork over our heads. No lawsuits. No quotas, no police brutality, no legal loopholes, no corruption. There's us. Justice, in its purest form. And in the end, even if it's all for nothing, if we're just lighting a tiny, insignificant candle – the light is there, and the fire burns."

Vortash's throat was suddenly very dry. Vakarian's eyes were still burning steady holes into his own, and it was becoming difficult to hold his gaze. The power in Vakarian's voice had been unmistakeable. It wasn't authority, for that was a different beast – it was simply the power of absolute, unwavering certainty. It thrilled Vortash, and it terrified him. The absolute was alien to him, almost unknown in his life of greys, and the purity of the ideals Vakarian had spoken of exhilarated him, making him feel as if it had been what he'd wanted all along. It also shook him to his core, because he had always known the absolute to be the province of madmen. The world just wasn't like that, but listening to Archangel – _and I wonder, is he the same person as Vakarian at all? _- could make a man believe otherwise.

And now he knew his choice. He hadn't believed Vakarian would kill him. He was absolutely wrong. He knew he would be welcomed, taken in, trusted... if he agreed to join. But he could no longer walk away. Vakarian's determination was a razor's edge; turned one way, it might cut deep gouges into the vicious, criminal murderers who ruled Omega's roost, and turned the other way, it could whisper across Vortash's throat and silence him forever.

He'd been wrong, then. _Hardly the first time, but never quite on such a lethal level as this._

_The gauntlet's down, then. Join, or die._

There could only be one answer to that. But even as they left, Vortash now riding in the skycar along with Vakarian and his people, it was an answer that made Vortash feel like an old, old man. The young might be able to see black and white, but for Vortash, it was all still a wash of funereal grey.


	50. Mote: Vacuum

**MOTE**

**FOUR: VACUUM**

* * *

A week passed.

Vortash wandered through it in a daze, mesmerised by the diversity of Vakarian's team. He'd expected a largely turian ensemble from the evident discipline he'd observed in Archangel's behaviour, but he'd never imagined it could be this broad and still function as a coherent force.

The humans didn't seem to hold any of the anti-turian prejudice he encountered from time to time in their species; Butler, the quiet, anxious-looking techie, was achingly polite to him, while Monteague and Weaver seemed to spend most of their time bickering amongst themselves. They made an interesting pair: one slim and hairless, one vast and hirsute, and there was apparently some kind of national rivalry between them as well. Vortash knew very little about human internal politics, but Butler had intimated to him that their respective homelands were broadly unimportant. That made sense. In Vortash's experience, how much people cared about something was often inversely proportional to how much it actually mattered.

The salarians were insane, of course, but in different ways: Mierin used words like they cost him a thousand creds apiece, and Erash was an explosion fetishist. On the third day after Vortash had joined, the bunk on the top floor of the base he'd taken to using had, along with about half the furniture on that level, disintegrated. After they'd treated him for minor burns, Erash insisted that the basic principle was sound – though when asked _which_ basic principle, he'd admitted it was up for debate. Vortash slept in his old apartment for two nights after that.

The turians... Vakarian was Vakarian, hardened from the man Vortash had known but still undeniably him. He didn't seem to have any downtime, and only slept about six hours a day. The rest of the time, he was poring over stolen data troves and drawing up complex plans in the air with his omnitool. Once, Vortash found him in the garage, shooting down a row of fifty or sixty empty cans and bottles with his rifle. He didn't miss a shot.

There was a single-mindedness to him which Vortash found both reassuring and unsettling. Reassuring because there was no doubt that Vakarian was as serious as he could be about Archangel, unsettling for just the same reason. Vortash knew there was uncertainty under the carapace and behind the visor, but Vakarian's actions betrayed no hint of any weakness or indecision. He'd expected dedication. Vakarian's seeming lack of any kind of personal life, though, was a step beyond. _A step too far, maybe. A man needs to stay sane._

Vortash could think of no better evidence for that than Ripper. He knew damaged goods when he saw them. It was in the stare. Nearly every time he saw Ripper, he was cleaning something: his elegant black armour, his weapons, the kitchen... and he did so with a strange, distant look in his eyes, like he was permanently watching something on a distant horizon. Even before he'd got the full story of V-33 out of the rest of them, something about Ripper's clinically, obsessively professional attitude got to him. Ripper was to soldiers as other soldiers were to civilians: he was on another level, a different, alien dimension. He'd even tried to call Vortash 'sir' for a while, and he was the only one who called Vakarian that. Vortash had heard about the cabals, though mostly from exaggerated rumour, bad films and a series of video games he'd played way back when he was a teenager, and the detective in him had wanted to drag every last detail out of Ripper – but he could see that there were wounds there which hadn't healed. Might never heal. And until they did, Ripper's eyes would always be glassy, distant.

Sidonis, on the other hand, Vortash tried not to talk to. The kid was brash, arrogant, rude, and worst of all, he was irredeemably, undeniably and offensively _young_. There was something fundamentally wrong with the universe, Vortash reflected, if Sidonis was allowed to be so youthful and he himself was condemned to a slowing, crumbling body. Sidonis would grow out of it in time, Vortash knew, but it still grated. He gathered that Sidonis had grown up on Invictus, away from the Hierarchy proper and with an unorthodox version of the mandatory military training all turians went through, and maybe that was part of it – _or most of it_.

Krul he found fascinating. The krogan was slow in a regal, intelligent way, thoughtful and meditative and devoid of almost every stereotypically krogan trait Vortash could think of. He behaved almost like an elcor in some ways, like a salarian in others, and like a krogan in none. Vortash hadn't got the full story yet, but what he'd heard sounded like what he'd expected – that Krul had been raised by non-krogans. As a case study into the nature-nurture debate, Krul was exemplary. Vortash had run across a number of non-conformist krogan – _if that's the word for it, and I don't think it is_ – in his time, but never one as unique as Krul; they had been urbane, restrained, cultured, yet simultaneously superficial, their outward façade only skin-deep. Krul seemed fundamentally different in a way that eluded Vortash. It might have been in his movements, or his speech, or his face, or any combination thereof.

To complement the krogan who was not a krogan was the volus who was not a volus. The first time Vortash had seen Melenis unfurl himself to his full, hulking size, he'd sat down on thin air out of surprise. Everyone had laughed. _Well, except me. And Melenis. And Mierin._

He'd always known the technology existed. Forms of it had seen use for those people unfortunate enough to have some rare genetic disorder or other that meant they couldn't have replacement body parts grown, and there were rumours that some salarian and human special forces, blacker than black, cybernetically enhanced their operatives in similar ways. He had, however, never expected to see it on a volus, and therein lay Melenis's greatest value. _Nobody suspects the volus. Well, not in this business, at least._

Melenis was the only one whose pre-Archangel life Vortash had learned absolutely nothing about. The name was clearly assumed, though he could only guess at why. Nobody seemed to know much about the volus, and Melenis himself was carefully, politely evasive when pushed.

Sensat was the closest to Melenis, and if anyone knew it would be him – but the batarian would never tell, perhaps only out of spite. Sensat seemed to exist in a constant state of exasperation with everyone around him. Out of everyone Vortash had ever met, he was a contender for the coveted prize of 'easiest to irritate', an impressive feat considering his competition. _Captain Fracanus once punched someone out for breathing too loudly in one of her briefings, I remember that much... mostly because it was me. Those were the days._

Sensat's role in the group wasn't immediately clear, partly due to his habit of locking himself in a small room all day, but it became obvious the day he came haring out of his study in the early hours of the night cycle, shoved past a yawning Vortash on his way to the bathroom for the second time in an hour, and threw a shoe at Vakarian while he slept.

"I was just getting your attention," Sensat was muttering an hour later, as Butler and Krul came hurrying in to complete the group. "I thought you would dodge it."

"I was asleep," Vakarian said wearily. There was a small gouge on his carapace just above his right eye. "I'm good, but not that good."

"I hope this is good," Butler said, collapsing into a couch next to Vortash. "I don't think Nalah likes it when I get dragged out of bed in the middle of the night. Come to think of it, _I_ don't like it either."

Vakarian glanced around, then stood. The murmuring died away, and eleven faces watched him intently. Even in the dead of night, bleeding from a wound made by a thrown shoe, he still radiated command.

"OK," he said. "I know getting up at this hour is a pain in the ass."

"Or the head," Erash said cheerfully. He got dirty looks, not for the comment but for the fact that he was as fresh-faced as ever. _Damn salarians. It's not fair. If I only needed an hour's sleep a night I'd rule the galaxy by now._

"As some of you might remember," Vakarian said, "about a week ago, we knocked over an Eclipse network hub." Vortash nodded when Vakarian looked sideways at him. "Now, that screwed their systems station-wide. That's the kind of harassment we want. If we do this right, they won't just be living in fear of us. No, it'll be much worse. They'll be annoyed. Every little thing will get just a bit harder for them, everything will run just a little less smoothly. Long-term, we're looking at destabilising the syndicates from within, encouraging decentralisation, fragmentation. Divide and conquer, in short. But along with that comes another imperative: we don't go for the big ones. We're not shooting for the moon any longer. This is small-scale guerilla action, not huge shows of force. There are examples from every history to show us why we shouldn't risk it all. The battle of Crythos Spire, the Skyllian Blitz, the assault on Jurionn City back in the third Lystheni uprising, the Tet Offensive... history shows that every time, the smaller force crippled themselves by playing to the rules set down by the people they were fighting against."

He paused, looked gravely around.

"Here it comes," Erash murmured.

"_But_," Vakarian said firmly, "tonight we have a unique opportunity. We swiped terabytes of data from Eclipse storage when we killed the hub, and we've had Butler and Sensat decoding it all week. Guys?"

Sensat stood up very quickly, before the yawning Butler had even stirred beside Vortash. "Basically, we're ignoring most of it. They might not have good discipline when it comes to file storage, but their encryption is top-notch. We have to unlock each file individually, and their ICE is way past the commercial shit you usually see. Still, we've got a lot of valuable stuff, mostly to do with off-station business – and that's why we're here. In-" He looked down at his omnitool, "-just under four hours, an Eclipse freighter comes in from Illium, loaded with what looks like high-value hardware. Not guns, but mechs, armoured vehicles, maybe even gunships. This is top fucking secret; the ICE around this was three, four times thicker than the average, which is why we cracked it in the first place."

"As far as we know," Vakarian continued, "the boys in yellow don't have a clue we were there to steal data. We got the techies outside before we started mining, and we had it done even before we were done setting the charges. Now, they might suspect we took some, but they _won't_ know we broke their highest levels of encryption. I hope."

Sussurant laughter rippled through the group.

"On the flipside," Sensat said, "if we act on this, we alert them to the fact that they're idiots, never a good move. They'll know we're good enough to get to them."

Vakarian nodded. "That means an increase in operational security, and our job gets harder. And that's not even considering the dangers of hitting them in the first place. It's on the border between harassment and large-scale assault, and the data we have on the ship has nothing about defences or security. We know- put it up, would you?"

Sensat tapped a few buttons on his omnitool. The lights dimmed, and a skeletal white hologram of the freighter appeared in mid-air, slowly rotating.

"Standard Hariyye _Wayfarer _class, fourth model," Vakarian said. He walked over to the ghostly image and held out a hand to quell its motion. "Now, the way we see it, there's no real way you can mod something like this for combat effectively; you might get firepower, if you sacrificed pretty much everything else, but even fully modded it'll manoeuvre like a drunken elcor. The _Hailfire _can run rings around it, snipe out their weapons before they can bring 'em to bear. That means it'll be boarding actions."

Sidonis half-raised a hand.

"Yes?"

"Can we not just blow them the fuck up?"

"We could," Vakarian said. "But we want to scour their computers, check their inventory, work out their routes so we can hit them again and regularly – this is about information, not just one shipment. It's a new kind of war now, and especially with Eclipse, you have to beat them at their own game. Turn their own tech against them."

"Know your enemy and know yourself, and you'll... be really bloody good," Weaver pronounced. He looked around smugly. "That's Sun-Tzu."

"A direct quote, no less," Monteague said under his breath.

"Indeed," Vakarian said, with a thin smile playing on his lips. "And besides, I've always wanted a gunship to call my own."

Sidonis snorted. "Whatever, have it your way. But if I get killed up there, I'm blaming you."

* * *

Discussion petered out fairly soon. There was unanimous agreement that the opportunity was too good to pass up. Vortash refrained from pointing out that this kind of opportunity had a horrible habit of ending in disaster, but a familiar feeling of cold, heavy paranoia settled in his chest nevertheless.

He remembered it from dozens of dangerous operations over the years. It was a deeply disquieting sensation, a stomach full of lead to carry down dark corridors and into the deepest hives in the Wards every time there was a tip-off the brass decided had to be acted on or an investigation was forced to a head prematurely by politics. _That is to say, frequently._

It was a younger man's game, no doubt, and he'd been acutely aware of that as he watched the plans as they were drawn onto the hologram. The geth attack had been the only time in fifteen years he'd seen major combat action, and it had been a living nightmare. They'd fought geth hand-to-hand in the streets of the Wards while wreckage and fire rained down like the judgement of an angry god, while centuries-old building crumbled and smoke blotted out the arclights overhead, and he'd fought like a man a third his age – until his body had caught up to him as they engaged a squad of juggernauts under the decapitated statue of Byara Trelyn on Fifteenth, and he'd been left a wheezing wreck with legs of jelly while battle raged around him.

That feeling of helplessness, with barely any breath in his chest and hands so weak they could barely hold a pistol as he slumped against the statue's base, was one of his worst experiences in a long life full of contenders. He remembered wondering if civilisation was coming to an end.

The same pistol rested in his hands now as the _Hailfire _flashed away from the spaceport and out through the air curtain. It was a better ship than Archangel had any right to; smaller than a frigate but larger than a corvette, it was designed to be piloted by a skeletal crew – in fact, Melenis could apparently fly it by himself. They wound through the traffic coming in and out of Omega and – Vortash watched this on a screen, little icons blinking and moving along dotted lines scratched into the fabric of the universe – took a wide trajectory out, away from the main lanes, cut the thrusters and drifted into position.

And waited.

Vortash explored the ship for half an hour, in which time he saw the whole thing twice. It was cramped, compact and built for function rather than style apart from what looked like a captain's quarters. He went through some of the files on the unlocked terminal; months old. A familiar name appeared. _Huh. So that's what happened to Gus Williams' old ship._

An hour later, he was breathing heavily into his helmet. He was still using the _Hailfire_'sair rather than his suit's own supply, but any hint of decompression and his air filter would clam up tighter than tight. It didn't make Vortash feel any better. He didn't like space. There was too damn much of the stuff.

The Eclipse ship ran late by a few minutes, enough to set some nerves jangling. _Could they know? _Ripper asked himself for the dozenth time, and then told himself: _No. There's no way._

"These lazy fucks had better get their asses in gear," Sidonis said loudly, and the ship appeared.

There was an instant of silence as the huge new blood-blue icon blinked on the main plot, ponderously drifting away from the relay.

Nobody shouted, Vortash recalled later. There was a bridge-wide intake of breath, a moment to take stock and react.

"Right," Vakarian said evenly. "Take us in, Mel."

On some level, Vortash had known space combat wasn't as flashy and headache-inducing as the vids made it look. The only time he'd seen it before, however, was at the Citadel, slumped against a broken statue, staring up into the electric play of lasers and k-strikes overhead. Even now, he could still see the _Normandy_ diving in to deliver the killer blow to the immense geth ship at the heart of the Citadel, howling past so close he could almost feel the wind on his face.

But all he saw on the _Hailfire_ was a screen of lines and icons and numbers that didn't make any sense to him. Machinery hummed and crackled deep within the ship, making the deckplates rumble beneath his feet, and once there was a sharp jerk to one side as something hammered into their kinetic barriers – but it was all over inside twenty seconds. The first he knew of it was when Vakarian sat back from his console and breathed out.

"Their central power core is offline," Melenis said. "Shields down, weapons destroyed, engines no longer functioning." There was a pause. "We have sustained no damage."

Weaver tugged at his beard. "Poor buggers. Come out of the relay and bang, they're crippled. It doesn't feel fair." He shrugged, and unhooked the strap of his Revenant from his shoulder. "Ah, well. Fuck 'em."

"Is that it?" Vortash said cautiously. "We won?"

"Well, they're a powerless, unarmed hulk drifting through space at the mercy of a much better-armed ship," Vakarian said, "so, yeah. We won. At least, we won _that_battle. Does it look like we need another one?"

That last was directed at Melenis in his pilot's seat. The volus hit a few more keys, waited ten seconds, then turned and shook his head. "No response to our demand of surrender. Their comms may be down, but it is unlikely."

Vakarian sighed. "So we're doing this the hard way. It's never the easy way, is it?"

* * *

Ten of them crowded into the shuttle, with Butler and Sensat remaining behind. It was only a few seconds from the _Hailfire _to the Eclipse ship, though the approach was made harder by the gentle head-over-tail spin the boxy grey mass of the freighter had been sent into by their onslaught. Sensors told them the freighter's auxiliary power had kicked in, with weak mass effect fields providing some gravity. The cargo bay had been ripped wide open by a raking laser from the _Hailfire_ designed for just that: making surgical incisions on an already-crippled target to allow for boarding action, and it was there they put down.

The lights had gone completely dark, with even the red pulse of the emergency lighting absent. The blackness made the cargo bay seem vast, a city of containers and crates wrapped in miles of shadow. Nobody was visible.

They made the breach perfectly. Vortash could still remember his old basic training on the matter, not to mention a few live-fire attacks on small-time pirate ships on the fringes of Hierarchy space, and it was second nature to fan out with the others and find cover behind a looming container. The gravity was maybe a third standard, making his every motion floaty and awkward. An oppressive silence filled the bay, broken only by the others' quiet breathing over the comm link. The atmosphere was long gone, a million little crystals floating somewhere in space outside.

He crouched there and waited for instructions, listening to the drumming of his heart – faster than it had been in years.

Vortash didn't know how how long it took for the first Eclipse trooper to arrive. It was more than ten seconds and less than ten minutes, but the time melted all into one mass in the darkness. Ghostly lines spooled across the inside of his helmet to delineate his surroundings, relying on scans over night-vision. The others were glowing webs in the shape of suits of armour, flexing and shifting slightly; the crates were wire blocks looming overhead.

Darkness, and heartbeats.

"Now," Vakarian said quietly.

Vortash's muscle memory took over, and he folded up and around into a firing position on the corner of his crate. Strings of red marked out the enemy shapes advancing into the room, some of them clearly organic and some unmistakeably synthetic, and before he could discern anything more, the air was ablaze with gunfire.

The blue-white streaks crackling away from Vortash's ancient pistol were lost in a sea of bullets. Assault rifles chattered noiselessly away on either side of him, punctuated by the sharp glare of Krul's shotgun as he advanced behind a mobile biotic barrier. Vortash's helmet was automatically cancelling out most of the light to maintain the visibility of the wire-mesh display, but Mierin was still visibly bathed in a harsh blue glow as he followed the krogan, hands buzzing with biotic power.

"Mechs on the left," Vakarian called, and Vortash swivelled to see a crate sliding open to disgorge a silent, slow-marching horde of LOKIs. He cursed himself for not having thought to scan the containers even as his pistol snickered in his hands. Three mechs went down before they reached the opening, one with its head burst apart into a mess of wires and melted plastic by a lucky shot from Vortash and two mown down by Weaver, who had shifted his child-sized LMG to sweep across the crate.

More were coming, stepping over their fallen predecessors. Vortash's body was racing with an electric fire that burned the years away like a shell of dry tinder, bringing to the surface sensations that had long been buried, sending pulses of excitement, energy and youth galloping through his old bones. His gun never seemed to overheat, though it must have time and again; to him it seemed like he was always firing, and every shot was hitting its mark.

Ripper had torn apart half a dozen mechs with one biotic vortex, chewing through the LOKIs with a burst of blue light and what would have been an explosive crunch in an atmosphere. Vortash downed two more with inch-perfect headshots he'd normally have taken ten minutes and fifty rounds to make, then swivelled at someone's cry over the comms to see an YMIR trundling around a corner, flanked by advancing Eclipse troops. One was cut down immediately by Vakarian, the unmistakeable gleam of his rifle's fire lancing through darkness, armour, flesh and bone in the blink of an eye. The salarian whose head he'd ventilated fell under the feet of the mech and was trampled by the unfeeling YMIR – but his organic allies flinched away, giving Vortash all the opening he needed to squeeze off the last few shots in his pistol before ducking down for the cool-off. Silent sprays of machine-gun fire fountained over his head and sparked away down the cargo bay, mixing with the constant glimmer of biotic power and occasional white flash of a deoxygenated explosion.

When he watched the recording of the battle later, it seemed almost calm. Played back, his breathing sounded measured, steady, and it was the only sound apart from the quiet scrapes and clinks of his combat armour as the light show played out overhead.

But at the time, it was like taking a jaunt through a mass relay in a go-kart.

When he rolled back out of cover, the YMIR was in pieces, the last of its fight ripped out of it by Weaver's Revenant before a bright flash signalled the explosion of one of Erash's sticky grenades on its 'chest'. It hit the ground in pieces, but more were coming, lumbering into position over fallen bodies and sparking LOKIs. Vortash watched one torn apart by two separate biotic fields and a close-range shotgun blast from Krul at the same time and felt the silent force of the explosion throw off him aim. One shot went wild, but his next four found their mark, chipping armour and circuits away from one barely-intact YMIR and sending it crashing down on top of another.

"We've got to move to the next bay," Vakarian said, making Vortash jump a little; it was the first voice he'd heard in a few minutes. "They're pulling back."

He was right, Vortash realised. The organics had been retreating for the last minute or so, leaving the last few mechs to hold them back – and the final holdouts were sparking on the floor.

They moved up as one, stepping over remains and through pools of blood mixed with synth-oils, delineated in Vortash's vision as chalk outlines in the dark. The airlock to the second cargo bay was a simpler model, an air curtain rather than a full rotary lock to allow for easier cargo transfer between the two.

Breaching it was almost like stepping through a waterfall; the sudden existence of air pressure outside his suit threw Vortash off a little, and the sudden return of noise after so long in the silence of the vacuum was disorienting. Gunfire started up almost as soon as they were through – and Vortash realised there were low-level emergency lights on here – nearly deafening him in the process. He dodged behind a stack of small crates to his left, finding himself next to Monteague.

"Well," Monteague muttered, "this is fun, isn't it?"

Vortash grinned under his helmet. "Oh, hell yes."

They peeled out of cover as one. It took Vortash a split-second to adjust and work out what he was looking at; here many of the crates had lost their bindings in the attack and were strewn all over the bay, and behind many of them there were helmets and guns. Vortash hesitated for a moment, spoilt for choice between targets, and then with a fizz of blue energy and jerk of his fist Monteague yanked an asari from behind her cover and sent her tumbling wildly across the room, wreathed in unearthly biotic light.

_That,_ Vortash's mind told him earnestly, _is a target._

He put three bullets through the helpless asari and the next three through a LOKI below as Monteague tossed the corpse aside and went for another – Sidonis got that one, and a sticky crunch that stayed with Vortash for the rest of his days signalled that Ripper had torn someone apart across the room. Every time Vortash picked a new target, someone else got their first: Vakarian was holing heads left, right and centre, Krul and Melenis were obliterating even YMIR mechs with their shotguns, and now that they were in atmosphere Erash was letting loose with his grenades, filling the air with shockwaves and debris.

Standing there in the midst of the carnage, swaying to the symphony of destruction, Vortash felt tiny and out of place. It wasn't a battle; the term gave the Eclipse too much credit. It was a massacre.

For just a moment, something inside him was aghast at the ruined bodies and spreading pools of before him. Then another wave of adrenalin surged up behind him and bore him away, and he was firing without knowing he'd even found a target. A young man's finger was on the trigger with a young man's eye at the sight, and the Eclipse couldn't come fast enough. In fact, the gunfire was petering out, and he began to wonder if it was all over-

"Oh," Vakarian said. "That's not good."

Vortash's senses were buzzing, but it took him a moment to see what the problem was. The only reason he didn't notice it sooner was because it was too big.

It rose up – not silently, though the clanking, whirring sounds of its motion had been hidden behind the firefight until moments ago – a huge silhouette visible through veils of smoke, looming over twenty-foot containers, almost brushing the high ceiling.

"Well, we're fucked," Weaver said cheerfully.

"I'm inclined to agree," Monteague murmured.

It was a mech, but unlike any Vortash had ever seen before. It towered over the YMIRs they'd left in pieces on the floor like an ancient colossus, and as its massive, slate-grey bulk swung towards them, he saw the clear, yellow-tinted duraplas canopy and realised there was someone inside it: a salarian in what looked to be an unarmoured spacesuit.

"**Do you have any idea who you're messing with, Archangel?!**" an amplified voice boomed, loud enough to vibrate the deckplates under Vortash's boots. "**You and your friends are dead!**"

There was an explosive crack, and what looked like the last organic enemy, peeking up behind a crate, dropped dead. Vakarian lowered his hissing rifle and slotted in a fresh clip.

"OK," he said. "New plan. Kill that thing."

Monteague snorted. "Tactical genius."

A massive, heavy machine-gun-equipped arm swung out towards them like a construction crane, and they moved.

Vortash ducked under a stream of white-hot bullets and hurled himself behind a few crates. Gunfire chattered away behind him, interspersed by the throaty roars of shotguns and the static crackle of biotic power; as he made his way around the cover, looking for a vantage point, somebody shouted _"Missile!"_ in his ear and he instinctively ducked, barrelled around a corner as an explosion rocked the bay – and ran straight into the Eclipse trooper coming the other way.

Instinct took over. Vortash's knee came up like a piston and crushed the human's hand against his Avenger, sending the gun clattering to the floor. The merc grunted and shoulder-charged him before Vortash could bring his pistol to bear and the two of them went sprawling, Vortash underneath. A fist drew back and slammed into his helmet, once, twice and three times, with Vortash desperately trying to shield himself with one arm, his legs scrabbling on the floor. Tiny cracks started to appear in his vision, helmet integrity warnings started to sound – and his pistol coughed in his hand.

The human hit him once more, drew back again, and then slumped sideways.

Vortash lay there panting for a few seconds. Spots of scarlet blood dotted his helmet's visor until the electrostatic wipers flitted across and spirited it away. The cracks started to fade, filled in by some clever system Vortash had never learned the name of.

Something exploded away to his right and he jumped to his feet, wrestled the dead human's legs from between his own and ran.

He rounded a corner and came face to face with a mound of crates held together by ancient duraplas netting. It was a dead end, but the crates didn't reach the ceiling.

_Never was much of a social climber..._

It took him ten seconds or so to scale it, pistol still clutched tightly in his hand, and the gunfire was only intensifying, the heavy rattling of the machine-gun coming so quickly it seemed to blend into one bass note that shook the whole ship. When he made it over the top, he wormed forwards under the two feet of clearance until he could see the mech below him, and opened fire. Waited for the cooldown. Opened fire again. And again.

His shots were insect bites for the vast machine; it was focused entirely on the others. From his perch, Vortash watched Melenis pound around one stack of crates, out of the mech's sight, hurdle another one and launch himself at the mech, driving mechanical fists into its back and pulling handfuls of wires loose. The mech waved its arms around itself almost comically in an attempt to dislodge him and succeeded, but the damage was done; Melenis bounced back to his feet and raced into cover as soon as he hit the floor, and sparks flew from the mech's exposed innards when it moved.

Vortash had no idea if he was helping or not; the mech seemed to rely entirely on armour with no kinetic barriers, and his pistol seemed like a pea-shooter against it. It was damaged, though, and the missile launcher on one arm was either broken or depleted; all it had left was the massive chaingun, and the cover was so ubiquitous and deep that it hadn't landed a single hit with it yet.

Vakarian's rifle snapped twice from somewhere out of sight and chips of duraplas spiralled away from the mech's canopy. It held, but a brittle, white web of cracks was spidering across it – and then a biotic burst tore chunks out its knee and sent the mech staggering sideways into a pile of heavy crates with a shearing screech of broken metal. The stack just about bore its weight, leaving the mech left hopelessly propped up, chaingun still firing but with its only good leg useless; if it took any weight off it, the whole thing would go tumbling over and it would be finished.

It was over anyway; its firing arc was limited, and Vortash watched as the team started to move around it and towards its exposed back. The excitement was slowly draining out of him now, leaving nothing behind but emptiness. He knew it was over, and all the energy that had been sustaining him for the last hour had evaporated. He fired one last time, watched the bullet make a minute, futile dent in the mech's armour, and then started working his way backwards.

Gunfire scored his return, picking his way carefully down the side of the crates and around them, over the body he'd left – a few feet away from where he thought he'd killed the man, the detective inside him noted; he must have had a minute or so of painful life left in him, and indeed blood trailed behind him where he'd tried to drag himself away – and back to the open area where they'd brought down the mech.

The chaingun was gone, ripped away from behind by Melenis, and the mech seemed to have nothing left. The team was emerging cautiously from cover and moving towards the fallen machine; Vortash was reminded of old nature documentaries showing some proud old beast whittled down to nothing by legions of tiny predators.

"Be careful," Vakarian said over comms, "he might still have-"

"Fuck that," Sidonis said confidently. "He's done for." He bounded forward to the canopy and rapped on it with the barrel of his assault rifle. "Isn't that right-"

The canopy hissed up, knocking Sidonis off-balance, and the salarian inside lunged at him. There was a crack as a pistol went off, then a retorting rattle as Sidonis instinctively fired. The salarian jerked and fell dead on his face, greenish blood splattered across the cockpit behind him. Sidonis turned away.

There was a hole in his armour, almost directly centred on his stomach. Blue blood leaked from it, horribly visible as it trickled down his steel-grey armour. Vortash watched, numb with horror, as Sidonis uncertainly touched the rent and raised his bloodied hand to eye-level.

"What?" he said, and his legs gave out. He sat down heavily, still staring confusedly at the wound.

Vakarian ripped off his helmet and came sprinting over, shouting something, and everything dissolved into chaos. Vortash had no significant medical training, and what he had was decades old, but even if he'd been a fully-trained paramedic he couldn't made himself move. Cold exhaustion was lapping around his thighs and surging higher still, and he felt older than he ever had before.

His own legs couldn't support him any more. He sat down, slumped against the crates, and watched. It all seemed so far away – all except for the tiny rivulet of young man's blood winding its way out of the press around Sidonis, and across the hard metal floor towards him.

Slowly, Vortash removed his own helmet, leant over to one side, and coughed up the contents of his stomach. The bitter acid taste stung his mouth and left him feeling painfully empty; a shell of decaying armour and old memories, wrapped around a vacuum.


	51. Mote: Epilogue

**MOTE**

**EPILOGUE**

* * *

Garrus found Sidonis standing on the balcony overlooking the bridge into the base. It was where he'd been for the last week, more or less.

He paused at the doorway and coughed. Sidonis didn't look round.

"Come on, then," he said. "Let's hear it."

Garrus stepped forward and stood next to him, leaning on the railing.

The lights of Omega dropped dizzyingly away to either side of the bridge. The path looked absurdly narrow from up there, and the barriers on the sides seemed tiny. _All too easy to take one wrong step, and fall..._

"You're not going to try and put a fatherly arm around my shoulders, are you?" Sidonis said. "Because Vortash tried that, and it was fucking weird."

Garrus couldn't help but chuckle at that. "He means well. It's a generational thing. What's that song Weaver keeps playing?"

"_Hope I die before I get old_," Sidonis muttered. "What idiot wrote that?"

"Vortash, maybe," Garrus said, grinning. Sidonis didn't smile with him. He'd been staring out over the lights of the station for days on end now, wearing the same thin white shirt for the last three; under it, Garrus could see the dressing for his wound, stained dark blue with blood, and small streaks of the same colour dotted the shirt where the dressing had been changed. Garrus's own smile faded.

"Still hurt?" he asked, mostly to avoid the silence.

Sidonis flicked the dressing with a finger and grimaced. "Yeah."

"You're on the painkillers?"

"Twice the recommended dose."

Garrus grunted in sympathy. "Give it another week or so."

"Yeah. And then I'll be all ready to go and get shot again."

Garrus considered humming the first few bars of _Die For The Cause_ and thought better of it. "You were unlucky this time," he said instead. "At that range, your shields were useless, and it was a heavy pistol-"

"Unlucky," Sidonis echoed. "Really? Because it feels more like I've been fucking lucky to get this far without a bullet in me."

"Yeah, well," Garrus said uncomfortably, "maybe we're just that good."

"We're not, though." Sidonis bent his head down, blinked a couple of times. "Or maybe I'm not."

Garrus shook his head sharply. "That's a load of crap and you know it."

"Maybe," Sidonis said distantly.

There was silence between them for a long few minutes. In the twilight, Garrus could hear all of Omega's myriad sounds; the whine and groan of skycars on all sides, the hum of air units, the murmur of people filling the streets at rush hour – and, above it all, the occasional gunshot. The gunshots had a way of getting to him. It was just another reminder that no matter how hard they tried, they could never do everything. _You can never save everyone._

"Garrus," Sidonis said eventually. He still hadn't looked up. "Where... where's this going? Archangel, I mean. Where does it all end?"

"When we've done all we can," Garrus said truthfully. "There's no answer to that. When does the law end? When does justice end? When we get tired of them? When we get bored?"

"When we get killed," Sidonis said.

Garrus breathed in, closed his eyes, and nodded. "Yes. It's not a fight we can walk away from."

"It's not a fight we can win, you mean."

"Yes."

Sidonis leaned closer to the railing, almost resting his head on it, and took a long, slow breath.

Then, he stepped back and looked up at Garrus. There was a deep, profound tiredness written in his face. It made him look ten years older.

"I'm twenty-three, Garrus. Twenty-three. And I came... I came so close to the edge there. I've got a life ahead of me, you know? I'm not like Vortash, or, or like Erash... or you, even. I can't do this forever, and I... look, I don't want to die here. I don't want to die on this fucking miserable hell-pit of a station. Not here. Not in this fucking city. And not for an impossible cause. There has to be an afterwards, man, there _has_ to be, because otherwise, otherwise it's just fucking... endless. I want to live. I want to have a life. I want something that's not just strategy meetings and gang wars, and- and you're standing there, telling me I can't have it. That I'll never get married, never have kids - hah - never grow old. _Hope I die before I get old,_ huh? Well, you can take that if you want it so fucking much, but don't bury me in your own fucking grave."

He was breathing heavily by the end of it. Garrus watched the sudden anger drain away into the same weariness he'd seen earlier, and then Sidonis lowered his eyes again.

"You told me once – a long time ago, now," Garrus said, after a moment, "that you'd be with me 'til the day you died."

"Things change," Sidonis said shortly. "But maybe I will. I'm not leaving, not yet. But it's... I'll have to, one day. Not today, not tomorrow. But I can't do this forever."

Garrus nodded slowly. "OK. Maybe you'll feel differently in a few days. But I won't stop you leaving if you want to."

Sidonis inclined his own head wordlessly. Garrus watched him for a moment, then clapped him on the shoulder and turned away.

Downstairs, he met Vortash.

The old detective's pale blue eyes were full of a concern Garrus hadn't seen there before. "How's the kid doing?"

Garrus glanced up; Sidonis was out of sight. "I don't know," he said, truthfully. "I think it shook him pretty bad."

Vortash blew air out through his teeth. "Yeah, I guess it would. Mortality does that to you. Like walking into a wall."

"He's a good kid, though," Garrus said.

"Yeah," Vortash echoed. "A good kid."

"Yeah."

* * *

Jaroth was currently ranking this day as his fourth-worst of the year. The loss of his idiot brother was one thing – although, all things considered, that actually counted as a net positive; his value to Eclipse was just about outweighed by just how annoying the little shit had been, and that had in fact pushed the day down from his tentative initial ranking of second-worst – but far worse was the loss of a complete shipment. Its value in credits was hovering in the air above his desk, slowly fading from red to white and back again every few seconds. It had an uncomfortable number of digits.

"Ganea," he said to the uncomfortable-looking asari before him – uncomfortable for a reason, since he had gone to some lengths to find a suitably unergonomic chair to put in front of his desk - "this is what we would call in the business _not good._"

"Yes, sir."

"Very much not good, in fact."

"Yes, sir."

"It is so not good, to go further, that I am quite seriously considering having you flayed alive, tanning your worthless azure hide and then having it made into novelty leather clothing for house pets."

"Yes, sir."

To her credit, Ganea didn't even blink. Jaroth made a note of it and resolved to come up with some new threats.

"This is Archangel again, isn't it." He deliberately dropped the question mark.

This time, Ganea let herself wince very slightly. "Yes, sir."

Jaroth nodded. "Computer, display total loss of assets, manpower included, due to the Archangel organisation in standard credits."

The number floating above his desk flickered and increased. Jaroth reached up and batted it gently with one hand, sending it spinning slowly above them.

"And this is merely what we have confirmed," he said. "That Blood Pack disaster on the Westro border, they say that was them as well. Missing personnel. Destroyed equipment. The debacle with Gus Williams. And now this."

"I'm sorry about your brother, sir," Ganea said, looking appropriately sympathetic. Jaroth's mouth twitched in disgust.

"As am I. It shows weakness on our part. I'd sooner have strangled the imbecile myself. Nearly did, once. But Mithrana and Cladion are far greater losses, and greater than them is _this_." He punched the number, sending it into wild spins and tumbles overhead. "This is unacceptable. Double- no, triple the bounty on Archangel. This has become a problem we must, ah, deal with before it deals with us."

To his satisfaction, Jaroth noted that Ganea had paled slightly. "Yes, sir."

"We may need to speak with Garm and Tarak," Jaroth said, mostly to himself. "Garm has reason enough to hate Archangel, and Tarak's lost a lot of money over this. A unified effort to stamp out a threat to all of us."

"A threat, sir? It's just a few people-"

"Do not underestimate the power of a few people," Jaroth said sharply. "Or even the power of one. Aria, for instance. Archangel's staying clear of her. Wise. She can bring more firepower to bear than the rest of this station put together, and the longer she profits from our... misfortunes, the more difficult it will be to achieve our ultimate ends. Archangel must die. I will accept quickly if necessary, but I would much prefer slowly. Broadcast live over every channel we control. I want him humiliated, broken, brought down to the ground. Icons are lethal, but a single turian being slowly dismembered, gibbering in pain all the while... well, I've seen enough of those in my time to know they're harmless."

Ganea smiled thinly. "Yes, sir."

"Now, as for-" Jaroth cut himself off, staring in annoyance at a blinking icon on his display. He tapped it. "Jin. Speak fast."

The voice coming in sounded panicked by that. "Uh, well, uh-"

Jaroth rolled his eyes. "Very well. Just speak."

"Well, we, uh, we got some of the data off the ship before they crashed, uh, crashed it into the sun, and there's a, a, a recording of Archangel... we have a shot of his face and of one of his team, another, uh, another turian, but they're too low-res for any kind of decent search program, I can maybe talk to-"

Jaroth drummed his fingers impatiently on his desk. "Is that it?"

"No, no, we- well, we got something, I think it's a name-"

That made Jaroth sit up very quickly. "A name? What name?"

"Well, uh," Jin began, sounding even more terrified now, "it's what Archangel shouted at one of his people when they were injured... it looks, uh, looks like your- your brother shot him – I think not, not fatally – before he was, uh... before he passed on-"

"Before he was shot, yes," Jaroth said. "What name?"

"Sidonis," Jin said.

"Sidonis!" Jaroth said, and let out a short cackle of unconstrained glee before he got himself back under control. "Excellent! Take a day off. No, an hour." He ended the call, then sat back again in his chair, ignoring Ganea completely. "Well, well, well."

His day had immediately retreated to only being the tenth-worst of the year now, and it had all the signs of getting better still. He rolled the name around his mouth one more time, his mind ablaze with all the wonderful thoughts of how he was going to bring Archangel crashing down in flames.

"Sidonis..."


	52. A Life For A Life

**MASS EFFECT: INTERREGNUM**

* * *

**A LIFE FOR A LIFE**

* * *

Kron Harga sat back and rubbed at tired eyes. "None?"

The batarian sitting across from him grunted, looking up from his omnitool. "None. They've shifted all their business through other channels. Says here they're working with some asari consortium and the Bhigenese-"

"The what?"

"Mid-size nation on Grackan. Hegemony space. Political dissidents, that kind of thing."

"Backwater batarian rabble-rousers?" Harga said, shaking his massive head. "Our product is better. Humans live longer, don't they?"

The batarian frowned and scratched idly at the side of his neck. "Yeah, I think so. We mature faster, though, so it balances out. Longer work cycle means a better price tag, and the gods know most of them don't see out a decade."

"Not necessarily," the krogan said. "A lot of it's the sex trade. I'll get a better price for a ten-year-old human any day."

"Probably," the batarian conceded. "Still, if we have no buyers, then we're getting no price at all."

"There's always someone. We'll ship them out to the DMZ if we have to. That run's still profitable, just about."

"Selling to Messenthale would be better."

"You said it yourself. He's not buying."

"Nasurn, then."

Harga laughed bitterly. "Crawling back to the old standby, huh?"

"We still have contacts in Aegohr. They'll pay."

"The sec on that kind of run, with that kind of heat, for those kinds of prices? We'll barely cover our costs."

"But we will," the batarian said. "We need it."

Harga heaved a sigh and rose from his chair. He went to the window and watched the lights of Omega twinkle and flicker in the twilight outside his makeshift office.

"We do," he said. "We really do."

"It's that fucking Archangel," the batarian said morosely. "That run was going to make us so much money, and he just had to fuck us... how many was it that we lost? A hundred?"

"Ninety-two."

"And the ship... the personnel... that shit isn't cheap."

Harga felt his hands hardening into fists behind his back. "We'll be ready next time."

"If we can afford a next time. And if Archangel doesn't-"

"He won't."

"You made him mad, you know."

"I know."

"Was it necessary? Ordering Naggen to space them all?"

Harga turned away from the window and settled back into his chair with a grunt. "Yes. It's a statement. Some statements have to be made."

The batarian shrugged. "Seems Archangel's got the same idea. He's been making statements all over the place while we've been away. Quite messily, by all accounts."

"He'll fall sooner or later. This is no place for a hero."

"Yeah, but until then, he's a problem."

"Not to us," Harga said firmly. "We've been careful. We're staying under the radar. From what I hear, he's busy with all the big boys. You hear they killed Jaroth's brother a couple of months back? It's open warfare out there, and we're just cutting a little profit on the side."

"A little," the batarian muttered. "So, Aegohr?"

Harga waved a hand. "Make the call. Better than just letting product sit there."

"And that's getting more expensive by the day. Some of them aren't eating."

"Well, that's to be expected. Usual remedy."

"Yeah, it's in place. That's why it's costing us."

"Good."

They sat in silence for a moment, then the batarian rose and left without another word.

Harga sat back and stretched, rolling his great head from side to side. Bones and joints clicked and popped satisfyingly. He'd missed Omega these past few months. It was a wonderful place to lose oneself in, to retreat into welcoming shadows and watch the money roll in. Usually. But the money was rolling out at the moment, and Harga wasn't entirely certain he could change that direction.

He'd lost it all before. Three times, in fact. Still, the last time he'd had to start from scratch was almost a hundred and ten years ago, when his partners had left him full of holes and emptied of blood in a tip somewhere down the wrong end of Garvug. He'd crawled out and fought his way back into the game – and killed all of the bastards who'd betrayed him, he remembered, smiling fondly at the memories – and he could do it again if he had to.

He didn't want to, though. Not to an upstart turian like Archangel. Three times Harga had fallen, and all three times it had been krogan doing the pushing. He was damned if he would let Archangel bring him down this time. He was better than that. And one day, he let himself hope, one day he'd get hold of Archangel before anyone else on the station, and he'd... well, he'd have to think about it. There were so many ways to hurt him and so little time to inflict them all, but Harga had a feeling that what would hurt Archangel most would not be physical torture. It would be to show him how empty his ideals were, how pointless they were in an uncaring galaxy, how little they could accomplish. Harga had showed him that once before, fleetingly. He hoped he might have a little longer the next time.

He spent an hour going through reams of figures on his terminal, squinting at the numbers as if they might improve if he concentrated enough. They resolutely refused to change. At last he grunted, slapped the 'sleep' icon and left his office.

Harga padded through the long-abandoned corridors that made up his latest base of operations on Omega. He saw nobody along the way. There were fewer people in his employ than there had been for decades now, just twelve where once there had been hundreds. Skeleton crews for the slave ships and enough to keep them under control was all he needed, and for that matter all he could afford.

His path took him through the holding area. The old converted shipping containers his operation had used to carry slaves for nigh-on seventy years now sat in a broad old room which had probably once been a manufacturing hub of some kind, watched over by a handful of guards. Harga nodded to them as he passed.

He was going nowhere in particular. He enjoyed stretching his legs, though, and the old factory he'd colonised had tendrils that stretched out deep into the remnants of the asteroid. He could walk for hours there and uncover places lost for centuries. Sometimes, there were bodies there, some of them just bones but others preserved by the total absence of life. Idly, Harga wondered how many thousands of forgotten graves like them existed on Omega alone.

When he came to the garage, he stopped. Sitting on a ledge overlooking the miniature fleet of heavy goods trucks he used for product transportation, he flicked up his omnitool and went through his notifications. He was pleased to see Kantel had already contacted their people in Aegohr, though he was less pleased to see the preliminary price offered to them. Like many things, it was worse than he'd hoped but better than it could have been.

A call was coming in from Kantel, according to a blinking icon. Harga ignored it for a while as he finished checking his last few emails, then opened the call.

Kantel said nothing.

Harga frowned at his omnitool. "Kantel? You there?"

No answer. Just silence.

"Fucking thing," Harga growled. Either his or Kantel's omnitool must have malfunctioned somehow. That was the only explanation, unless-

A door hissed open behind Harga, and somebody shot him.

Harga uncomprehendingly watched orange viscera burst out of his chest and splatter the floor in front of him as the thunder of the shot rolled around the room, then slowly pitched forward. His limbs had stopped obeying him. The smell of his blood was heavy in the air as he lay there, his breathing ragged, his mind filled with just one word: _What?_

Footsteps came his way, hard and metallic. Combat boots on a durasteel floor. Harga knew they were the sound of death.

The pain filling his body was receding, held at bay by millions of years of evolution, and feeling started to return to his extremities. He reached out and tried to crawl away. His hand slid and scraped on his own blood – and then another deafening gunshot sounded, and the hand was gone.

Harga sobbed in agonised terror at the sight of the ruined stump. The pain came roaring back like a tidal wave, but his survival instincts were still strong enough to keep him dragging himself through his blood, away from the footsteps still advancing on him from behind. Harga's eyes were fixed on the crates ten metres or so ahead of him, his mind convinced that somehow he could find safety behind them.

His other hand exploded into a mess of minced flesh and splintered bone, and Harga screamed.

"You know, that looks like it hurts," somebody said. Harga had lapsed into whimpering, shellshocked by the sight of the stumps where his hands had been. They would grow back in a month or two, but even when wracked by fear and pain, he knew that he wouldn't see another hour, let alone a month. "Need a hand?"

The footsteps drew closer still and came to a stop. "Too obvious? Well, I'm a vigilante, not a comedian."

Harga gathered every fibre of strength left in his body and lurched upright, swinging around to face his attacked with blood pouring from his wrists and chest, bellowing a primal rage he hadn't felt in centuries. He came face to face with the butt of a rifle coming very quickly in the other direction.

Bone crunched and fractured, and Harga's vision went red. He fell back, coughing and choking on the blood pouring into his mouth from both his head and lungs.

"No, no, please don't get up on my account. I insist." Through the muted buzz of pain dominating his mind and immobilising his body, Harga heard the footsteps again, pacing slowly around him as he lay spluttering on the blood-slick floor. All he could see was red. "Maybe you're wondering what happened to all your friends?"

It hadn't occurred to Harga.

"No? Well, they're all dead. Every last one of them. Just thought you might like to know that. And, knowing that... how well do you think that bodes for you?"

Harga heard something heavy-sounding scraping along the floor before coming to a stop somewhere in front of him. Through the red film coating his eyes, he could just about make out a figure taking a seat on top of a crate.

"You see, I'm not here with my team. I'm alone. And I've killed everyone else in the building. It's just you and me, Kron Harga, and sooner or later it's just going to be me. There's no changing that. You will not survive today. Which breaks a long-running streak, actually. I did a little research on you while I was tracking you down – well, I tell a lie. A friend of mine did a little research on you, and she uncovered some interesting facts. Did you know, for example, that going by standard Citadel-scale years, it's your seven hundred and fifty-second birthday?"

_No_, Harga tried to say, but it came out as a piteous belch of blood.

"I always feel a little strange killing krogan or asari. Most of us can expect to live to a hundred-forty, hundred-fifty or so. A hundred for batarians and quarians, sixty for volus, forty for salarians, twenty for vorcha. A few hundred for elcor, but I don't think I've ever killed an elcor, it's just so much effort... but asari and krogan, I've killed in the dozens. You can live for millennia. To kill something which would otherwise live for another thousand, two thousand years... it's a big undertaking. You feel like they should count for more. In fact, I think some of the asari republics vary the severity of penalty for murder based on how many more years the victim theoretically had left to live, and invariably people call them racist for that. Kill an asari, and it's death... kill a salarian, and you might be out in twenty years. Don't you find that interesting?"

Harga spat blood and bile onto the floor and squinted up at the figure sitting on the crate. His vision was clearing and his nervous system adapting, and he could almost move again.

"Please-"

The turian – and now Harga knew it was Archangel before him, and cold fear sent spasms through his gut – ignored him and kept talking.

"Happy birthday, by the way. Enjoy what's left of it. But there are a few more interesting things my friend turned up. For instance, we were able to find where you'd been because – and this is the best part – you were stupid enough to show me your face. So that went out around the galaxy, and we found a few hotspots. Only in the places with the best cameras, though. Places like Aegohr. Your face appeared on an awful lot of records there, but you were never flagged as anything other than a law-abiding private citizen. Of course, you were a krogan on a 95% salarian world, but a well-behaved one. A 'progressive', as you put it. And so we pulled at the thread, and pulled a little more, and a little more, and we uncovered a whole _nest_ of slavers there! Can you imagine it? One of the most advanced, crime-free cities in Citadel space, home to the largest slaver operation that side of Terminus! Incredible, really. You can bet we'll be passing that on to relevant authorities, as is our duty as good citizens. Of course, I wouldn't dream of letting word get out and seeing you scared off the station when the raids started. I wasn't finished with you."

Slowly, powered more by raw hate than anything else, Harga managed to lift himself to one knee. Archangel cocked his head, twitched his rifle, and blew Harga's lower leg off.

When Harga came around, he threw up. Archangel watched him silently for a couple of minutes as Harga retched and sobbed, bringing up not just blood but lumps of flesh and even fragments of bone from the gaping wound in his chest. At last there was nothing more to come up, but blood was still steadily pumping from various wounds faster than even krogan biology could replenish it.

"Feeling better now?" Archangel said. Harga didn't respond. "I hope not. I expected you'd last a little longer." He laid the rifle on his lap and reached up to remove his helmet, setting it down on the crate to his side. Harga's vision was still hazy and smeared with red, but he could make out the blue glint of the visor beneath.

Archangel sighed and leant his chin on steepled fingers. "I'm enjoying this. I can't tell you just how satisfying this is for me, and equally I can't tell you just how much that unnerves me in turn. This is the reason I'm here alone. I could never let my team see this. I've spent so many months insisting we have to keep it impartial, impersonal, justice is blind, all that. And we do. Those are the rules. If I were following them, you'd already be dead and I'd be gone. So I'm not here as Archangel. I'm just here as Garrus. That's my name, by the way. Garrus."

"Garrus," Harga wheezed.

Archangel was silent for a long moment. Eventually, he placed the rifle on the crate next to his helmet, slid to his feet and began pacing around Harga. Out of the corner of his eye, Harga saw him draw a pistol from his belt.

"It's getting harder every day." Harga listened in dread as the voice and the footsteps made slow, predatory circles around him. "I never intended this – the whole Archangel thing - to be anything more than me. I was just doing what I felt like I had to. And now I'm this, this _icon_, this great hero of justice, this angelic figure that so many people look up to with so much hope, and there's my team..."

There was a sharp crack behind Harga, and he yelped in pain as he realised Archangel had just shot him in the back.

As Harga fought back hot, nauseating pulses of pain, Archangel continued. Harga watched the blood drip from his boots as he passed in front of his face. "I have to meet standards which nobody can possibly live up to, or at least not for long. That's the whole point. I have to be the law, but that's impossible. I'm not good enough. I never can be. Sometimes, I feel like I have to, have to turn into someone else just to stay sane while I'm doing it. And sometimes I wonder whether Archangel is just a name, or something more. I don't know how much I can control Archangel. And I don't know how much longer we can co-exist, because this... this is killing me. Do you have any idea how much pressure I'm under? No, of course not. How could you? It's like... it's like trying to catch a million pieces of paper in the wind before they hit the ground, except you can only do it with two fingers and people are shooting at you all the time and if you don't do it then all your friends die, and it's... it's just- it's madness. And you know the sad thing, the really _fucking_ sad, stupid thing? The only person on this whole damn station who I can talk about it to is _you_! When you can only talk about your personal life to people you're about to kill, that's a pretty sure sign you've gone badly off-track somewhere!"

Archangel's voice had been rising almost into a shout by the end, and he punctuated the end of the sentence with another gunshot into what felt like a fairly vital organ. Harga screamed.

Over his own moans of pain, he could hear Archangel breathing hard. The turian stalked aroung and up to Harga's bloodied, broken head, and knelt down beside him.

"I recorded every word of our conversation all those months ago, you know," he said, almost whispering. "Do you know how many times I've listened to it? How many times I've replayed it? I can recite it, word for word. Everything you said. '_I want you to remember who beat you._' Remember saying that? '_I want to be in your dreams. I want to be the face you see when you think about your greatest failure. I want you to hate me, Archangel._' Well, you managed that well enough. '_I want you to hate me with everything you have and to know that you'll never stop me. I want you to know that there are a hundred slaves - whose lives will probably be a living hell until they're worn out and disposed of – who you didn't save._' I did stop you, but you were right. Not soon enough to save them."

Archangel's voice never wavered, and icy blue eyes watched Harga steadily.

"'_I want you to know that you're not good enough,_'" he hissed, "'_and that you never will be._' Remember that? You should. I do. I've heard those words every damn day for months. No, years. I've heard that all my life. You were just the first one to say it out loud. Everything I've ever been just wasn't quite good enough, was it? Not enough to make the difference I want to make. Not enough to do my job like I'm supposed to. Not the son I was meant to be. There was always someone bigger and better, and I thought- I thought when I was out here on my own, I could be more. But you're right. You were right all along. I'm not good enough. And I never will be. I can't even live up to my own principles. I can't change anything about this hellhole, and I know it – but I've still got to try, because that's the grave I've dug for myself and all my friends. That's where it ends. There's just nothing else I can do."

He stood up abruptly and backed away, pistol hanging loosely by his side. Harga watched him go, his mind thick with pain. Archangel wiped his mouth on his combat suit's sleeve and stared up at the ceiling for a moment.

Harga flinched when those eyes came back down to him. Death was shining from them like a searchlight.

"You were right, then," Archangel said softly. "You were right about me." He strode over to the crate and donned his helmet and rifle. "Maybe that'll be some comfort to you. Going somewhere?"

Harga was, albeit very slowly. His limbs were working only in fits and starts and most of them were still bleeding profusely, but he could drag himself away from the avenging angel behind him, inch by bloody inch, his eyes fixed on the same crates which had seemed to be a beacon of safety when the first bullet had struck.

"Have it your way, then," Archangel said. Footsteps followed Harga as he desperately clawed his way across the floor, breath coming in ragged sobs and leaving as red mist. The crates were close now. It would just take a few seconds more...

Harga reached the crates, filled with the fevered, absurd feeling that he had somehow won. He reached up with his raw stump, trying to haul himself behind them and into safety, but there was barely enough strength left in him to lift his head just high enough to read the word printed on the side–

–the word '_**EXPLOSIVE**_'.


	53. Omega And Alpha: Epigraph

**MASS EFFECT: INTERREGNUM**

* * *

**OMEGA AND ALPHA**

**EPIGRAPH**

* * *

_Well, the night weighs heavy on his guilty mind_

_This far from the border line_

_When the hitman comes_

_He knows damn well he has been cheated_

_And he says_

_"Help, I'm stepping into the twilight zone_

_Place is a madhouse, feels like being cloned_

_My beacon's been moved under moon and star_

_Where am I to go now that I've gone too far?"_

_Soon you will come to know_

_When the bullet hits the bone_

_Soon you will come to know_

_When the bullet hits the bone_

_When the bullet hits the bone..._

* * *

'Twilight Zone' – Golden Earring

* * *

**ω**


	54. Omega And Alpha

**OMEGA AND ALPHA**

* * *

**I**

_**The Omegan Dream**_

* * *

From ten thousand kilometres out, Omega was barely visible – a little shred of metal and rock fused into a rounded T-shape, pulsing with the faintest of orange glows. Sensors could give a picture many times better, but with the naked eye or through an uncorrected camera, it was barely bigger than any of the thousands of other lonely asteroids drifting around Sahrabarik.

Even at close range it was small; its habitable sections were larger than the average city, but its past was so chequered and chaotic that huge swathes of it were abandoned to decay. Perhaps thirty percent of what could have been lived in _was _lived in, and those parts were inevitably built over and into and from the ruins of dozens of cycles of exodus and revanchism, going all the way back to the days when Prothean industry had created the station in the first place.

Omega was a vast domain of the secret and the forgotten, a place where the fringes of worlds brushed over each other and mingled, a realm inherently steeped in mystery and the plastic romance of uncivilised frontiers. You could find anyone here, any group no matter how reviled; the Lystheni, the Hardworlders, the GLF – there were even rumours of Ardat-Yakshi prowling through Omega's perennial twilight, and they might even be true.

All this and more flickered momentarily through Jaroth's mind as he watched Omega swell up on the viewscreen. The station had so much _potential_, so much scope to expand and consolidate and grow into the power the Council had always feared Terminus would one day spit out, and yet it was wracked by war and – no, not war; war was too strong a word for it. War implied order, organisation, coherence. What Omega had was violence. Directionless, destructive, useless violence. Swirls and eddies of factional conflict, solving nothing and creating nothing but more red ink, and the losses could so easily be avoided...

Jaroth turned away from the viewscreen and settled into his chair. His desk was cluttered with a dozen soft-light holographic displays detailing the minutiae of events while he'd been at HQ. Nothing out of the ordinary, though Archangel had struck twice against Eclipse targets in the two weeks he'd been away; they'd lost another of the wide-net server hubs, a manageable loss, but more worrying was the complete destruction of the command chain in Laclan District. Although his subordinates had scrambled replacements in the next day, Jaroth had no doubt that their hold on the entire Fifth Sector was shakier than it had been at any point since the Consolidation debacle.

_Something has to be done..._

The pilot's voice buzzed over the intercom. "We'll be touching down in five minutes, sir."

Jaroth nodded, and swiped the reports into a virtual waste bin. He'd read them all five times or more already. They'd run their holdings competently enough without him there, but not even he had put a dent in Archangel. _Yet._

That would change. Archangel might not know it, but events had been in motion for months now, and they were slowly but surely grinding towards an endgame. Jaroth estimated that there was a ninety percent chance that Archangel would be dead within perhaps twenty days; equally, there was a chance of anywhere between thirty and fifty percent that Jaroth would join him.

It was a risk worth taking. Jaroth was wary of empty clichés, but he knew Omega was approaching a crossroads. It would all come down to a few hectic days that could change the station forever – or lock it in on its present course to gradual self-destruction. There was a real chance to break the cycle of wasted violence, to build something that could collect it, focus it, _use _it. Omega didn't have to be lawless. It didn't have to be chaos. It could be so much more.

He found his hands were reflexively curled into tight balls on his desk, and he slowly relaxed them. _Archangel understands this_, he thought. _We share a dream: to mould Omega into something better. We just differ on 'better'. It's almost a shame he's going to die. Almost._

Garm was a brute. His mind wasn't sharp, but it was backed up by enough raw will that it could bludgeon its way through most obstacles. Tarak was almost the opposite, a razor-edged ball of tumbling nerves which looked deceptively fragile but would slice any attacker to shreds. Jaroth respected neither. He would use them and then discard them as soon as possible, or perhaps play one against the other and take sides. Aria he held a grudging admiration for, though he hated the smallness of her goals, her willingness to squat in the ruins and call herself queen when she had the power to alter Omega's dark heart. The bitch was ruthless and blindingly intelligent, but limited by her lack of ambition, or perhaps just a lack of vision.

But Archangel... Archangel was the most dangerous of the lot. He had something more dangerous than intelligence (though he had that) or tactical nous (and that) or even luck (and he certainly had that). Archangel had principles. The concept fascinated Jaroth. How any man could keep on living in the galaxy – in Omega, no less – with _principles _was alien to him. How could principles survive? What kind of mind could maintain them in the face of the nakedly brutal, uncaring, ruinous nature of reality? What dynamo drove him? What light lit his way?

Jaroth regarded Archangel with a strange kind of awe, and hated that he did, for he knew he was unconsciously buying into that idiotic 'icon' nonsense the local net teemed with. Archangel was nothing more than a man, but men could climb so high... _and fall so far. _Men could do the extraordinary. Archangel had. He'd waged war for over a year not on a group or even multiple groups, but on an idea: on the very nature of Omega. He was a man with a pistol against a dreadnought, _and he hadn't lost yet. _He hadn't died. He hadn't compromised his principles. Jaroth couldn't help but respect that. There was something wonderful about the absolute. It was beautiful, in a way.

_It will be a shame to lose him. It feels like iconoclasm._

But such losses were inevitable in Jaroth's grand plan, and for all his brilliance, Archangel was just a part of them. There would come a time when people would look back on these handful of bloody days as the days the future of Omega was set – though whether they would be the dawn of a new order or the dramatic death throes of Omega's last shot at glory remained to be seen. It all came down to six people: Jaroth, Tarak, Garm, Aria, Archangel... and the last piece of the puzzle, the key to the first door.

Jaroth muttered the name again, like a mantra. "Sidonis..."

* * *

**II**

_**Archangelus Sumus**_

* * *

Garrus awoke slowly from furtive dreams. A familiar grey ceiling looked down on him.

_Something isn't right. What's missing...?_

A moment later, he realised that there was a startling absence of Killer Three's 'Plutonium Fantasy', the song which usually woke him at 6:00 ST. He turned over and fumbled for his visor on his nightstand. His hand closed on air, and the hangover hit him.

He groaned aloud. "Ah, damn it all to hell."

His hand found a drawer and fished around for painkillers. He found a couple of smart pills, choked them down without water, and lay back. After a moment, the light became bearable and the pounding in his head faded to a manageable level.

Bits and pieces of last night wandered back to him as he shuffled across the room and into the shower. There'd been a lot of drinking. He remembered the Spider Bar, the Supernova, the Hyperion... somewhere very strange with a lot of bright green lights... and... Afterlife? _Spirits, we didn't go to Afterlife, did we? Must have been somewhere worse. And cheaper._

The shower washed away some of the hangover, as well as some strange substances Garrus didn't particularly want to identify, and by the time he'd towelled off (the dryer function was broken again, and Sensat point-blank refused to lower himself to being 'a fucking plumber') he felt almost alive again.

Garrus shrugged on a robe and padded out of his room. He'd finally remembered what had happened to his visor. It hadn't been pretty. Knowing Sensat, though, it was probably fixed and improved twofold by now.

Vortash was leaning over the balcony overlooking the bridge, clouds of vapour from his e-cigar curling up and away into the twilight. He was shirtless. From behind, Garrus could see dozens of scrapes and scars cut into his carapace, faded with age but no less deep for it.

"You know," Vortash said, without turning, "if I drank as much as you did last night, I'd probably be dead."

Garrus grinned. He went to the railing and leaned back against it. "Yeah, old-timer, I bet you would."

Vortash blew a thick, ragged smoke ring and eyed it critically. "Hrm. Used to better at those. Better at drinking too. There was a time – oh, must have been thirty, thirty-five years back now, before you were even born – when a few friends and I finished our black patrol assignment on the same day. Hit the bars to celebrate. I woke up two days later with a receipt for an industrial refrigerator. I got a refund, but I never did work out why I bought it in the first place. I mean, a fridge? Cars, yeah; clothes, maybe; guns, possibly... I don't know. Strange days."

Garrus snorted. "Strange days indeed."

"Long time past now," Vortash said wistfully. "Spirits, I miss the days when my liver could hold its own. You kids don't know how good you have it."

"Yeah," Garrus said distantly. He let his gaze wander over the chaotic jumble of Omega's starscrapers. The orange glow behind it all made it seem to him as though a fire was burning somewhere in the distance, lurking behind the decoration, ready to sweep it all away and sear Omega clean.

Vortash took a long drag on his e-cigar. "Beautiful, isn't it? In its own way. It's not the Citadel, but... there's something about it. Something wild."

"Never had you down as a great aesthete," Garrus said.

"Neither did I." Vortash shrugged. "Maybe it's just one of those things that happens to you when you get old. One day, before I know it, I'll be doing something like hill-walking, and being one of those loud, stupid tourists with the ridiculous shirts."

"A dark day for us all."

Vortash chuckled under his breath. "This is Omega. Every day is dark."

Somewhere off in another room, something glass shattered, followed by the sound of a muffled curse.

Garrus frowned. "What was that?"

"Ripper," Vortash said. "He's been at it for a couple of hours now."

"At what?"

"Go and have a look." Vortash glanced down and smiled. "Maybe put on some shoes first. Or stand outside the door."

Garrus pushed himself back from the railing and headed for the source of the noise, leaving Vortash to watch the starline alone.

It was one of the smaller rooms off to the side that they used to store equipment, which in practice meant crates full of things they never used but which seemed like they might be useful in a handful of very specific scenarios. He opened the door and gingerly stepped inside.

Ripper was on his hands and knees, carefully sweeping shards of glass into a small pile in the corner. He glanced up when Garrus came in.

"Archangel. Can I help you?"

Garrus shoved a half-ruined set of expensive body armour to one side and perched on a crate. "Probably not. What are you up to?"

Ripper finished collecting the glass and stood up, stretching. "Training."

"Training what?"

"My biotics."

Garrus cocked his head. "Those same biotics which I've seen rip a krogan to shreds? You get any better and it's going to be unfair. A bit like hunting pyjacks with a tank." _That was a fun afternoon, though..._

"Not like that," Ripper said. He reached into a plastic box on a crowded workbench and removed a square drinking glass, which he placed on the floor in the middle of the room. "I don't need power, I need control."

He extended a hand, and the familiar blue crackle sent ethereal shadows dancing across the room. Light blossomed around Ripper's hand and then the glass, which slowly began to rise into the air. Garrus watched, first with his eyes on the glass and then on Ripper's face, which was deeply furrowed with concentration.

Ripper left the glass hanging at around head height, his hand quivering with the effort. The glass was vibrating too, occasionally twitching in the air as Ripper struggled to get the balance right. Garrus had seen similar scenes before with biotic rookies just learning to use their powers, and from an outsider's perspective this must have looked similar – but Ripper's problem wasn't mustering the strength to do it; it was that he was fighting not to crush it.

Ripper held it there for ten or fifteen seconds, audibly grunting with the effort, and then slowly started to lower it back to the floor. About a metre up, the glass jumped five centimetres to the side, shivered with violent intensity, and exploded. Shards of glass sprayed out across the room, tinkling on the floor as the biotic buzz wavered and failed. Garrus had instinctively covered his eyes with an arm, but the glass hadn't reached that far.

"_Fuck!_" Ripper hissed. A long sliver of glass was embedded in his carapace just above the wrist, though he didn't seem to feel it; he just reached down and plucked it out before dropping to hands and knees to pick up the latest round of shards. A couple of drops of blood welled up from the nick and dripped onto the floor. Garrus couldn't help but notice that they weren't the first.

"You almost had it," Garrus said encouragingly. "You know, right up until it disintegrated."

Ripper shook his head as he gathered the pieces. "There are twelve-year-olds who can do better. It should be _easy_, damn it! I've got the power, but brute force isn't enough... I need something I don't have. Maybe something I can't ever have."

Garrus watched the shimmering play of light on the drying spots of blood on the floor. "You can learn control."

"Maybe. Doesn't feel that way. Feels like one of those square peg, round hole things. Like I'm just pushing as hard as I can and going nowhere."

Garrus grinned. "Don't we all? Sounds like life in general, if you ask me."

Ripper tipped the glass into a bin and stood up, cracking his neck from side to side. "Maybe," he repeated. "Seems I can't touch a damn thing without destroying it."

He took out another glass, placed it on the floor, and stepped back.

"Careful," Garrus said, preemptively covering his eyes.

Ripper grunted. "Trying to be." Blue light corralled the shadows of the room into dense, pulsing slivers, and the glass began to rise. One foot, two – and then it burst apart with a shearing shriek and scattered itself across the room.

Neither of them spoke. Ripper stood there, breathing heavily, eyes screwed close and fists balled at his sides.

"Damn it," he said quietly. "Fucking... damn it."

"We don't need you to lift cups, Ripper," Garrus said, after a moment. "You don't have to-"

"Yes," Ripper said sharply. "I do. I don't want to just be some tool of destruction. If you could solve every problem with raw power, the krogan would be running the universe. And I should be able to fucking do this!"

He kicked a crate, producing a loud clang, and slowly knelt down to pick up the pieces.

"Sorry, Archangel," he said. "I'm not at my best. Come back later."

Garrus watched him for a second as Ripper picked up the first shard. Long and knifelike, it flashed silver under the light.

"Yeah," he said, and stood up. "OK. Don't hurt yourself."

"I don't care if it hurts," Ripper said. "I want to have control."

Garrus shifted his weight uneasily from foot to foot. "Be careful, Ripper. There's always some things just out of reach. Try to take them anyway, and people just get hurt with nothing to show for it."

"Maybe," Ripper said, "but you'll never know if you never try."

Garrus's headache was starting to ebb back into his mind, clouding it around the edges. He left Ripper collecting the shattered remnants of the glass from the floor and made his way back to the bedroom. This time he went for the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and found some proper painkillers, something more solid than the instant, fleeting boost of the smart pills. They chased the muddiness back to the very fringes of his brain, keeping it just far enough away that he couldn't feel it and not quite far enough away that it was gone completely. It was still hanging there like storm clouds on a distant horizon as he made his way downstairs.

Erash's voice floated up from the lounge. "Oh, bullshit! _Bullshit!_"

It was followed by Butler's. "Just respawn, respawn, I have him pinned down, you can – Jesus Christ! How the hell-"

"_**Game over,**_" a narrator with a voice like a krogan who'd swallowed a mountain rumbled. "_**Mierin wins.**_"

"Bull-fucking-shit," Erash pronounced. Garrus reached the foot of the stairs and turned to see the familiar endgame screen of _Medal of Duty _plastered across the wall. Erash was sprawled back on the couch, shaking his head, while Butler sat back on the other side, his head in his hands and disbelief on his face. Between them, Mierin was flicking a hand back and forth, shuttling through various screens of increasingly in-depth statistics on the game screen.

"Unbelievable," Butler muttered. "We were so damn close that time."

"You do it just to fuck with us, don't you?" Erash said, jabbing a finger at Mierin. "You _let_ us get close, and then you smack us down at the last second as soon as we start hoping we might win."

Mierin glanced at him. "No."

Erash threw his hands up. "Then we've angered a god of some kind. It's the only rational explanation." He caught sight of Garrus and grimaced. "Garrus. Here to watch our failure, are you?"

"Well, not specifically," Garrus said, leaning over the back of the couch, "but you know me. If there's a good failure to be watched, I won't turn away."

"He's like a sort of... super-powered video game-playing machine," Erash said. "It's ridiculous. And it's not just this. You should see him playing Krogan: Total War. He was in the top thousand players galaxy-wide."

"Six hundred and fourteenth," Mierin said.

"There's no point even trying," Butler said. "We can't win. Even when it's two against one. No matter what we do, it's always going to end the same way, and we can't do a damn thing to stop it. Absolutely zero chance of survival. Like it's destiny."

"Destiny," Erash echoed. "Yeah, that's about the size of it. We were doomed from the start."

"Watch," Butler said, and tapped at his omnitool. _Medal of Duty _vanished, replaced by _Galactic Racing 2185_. Thudding electronic music started up as the course and cars were selected, and then they were off, three top-of-the-range sports skycars howling through a storm-wracked volcanic landscape, dodging gouts of lava and diving through twisting canyons over rivers of fire. The game was showing each of its players only their own car, but as an observer Garrus got the whole picture, and he winced as Butler's car spun wildly out of control into a sheer cliff as it nicked a rock formation on a sharp turn. Butler cursed under his breath as bits of machine rained down into the lava. His car reappeared after a second, but already too far back to make up the lost ground.

Ahead, Erash and Mierin were jostling for position, their cars' shields occasionally clashing in a cloud of blue sparks that blew dramatically out from the screen. It looked like a real contest – until Mierin's car abruptly plummeted a hundred metres and disappeared into a hair-wide crevice. The car jinked and wove between stalagmites and outcroppings at blinding speed, faster than any organic reactions should have been able to manage, all while Erash took a tortuously longer route that left him thirty seconds or more behind when Mierin finally soared out into the open and blasted down the home straight.

"_**Player 3**__** wins!**_" the game announced, and threw a miniature shower of holographic confetti across the room. Erash yanked his imaginary steering wheel right and smashed his car to pieces on the canyon wall.

Garrus poked Mierin in the small of the back. "Ever played that game before?"

"No."

"Hate to say it, boys, but I think you might just be screwed," Garrus said, shaking his head. "Spirits help anyone who gets in this guy's way."

"It was always like this, back in- back in the day," Erash said. _Cute. He still thinks I haven't worked out they were STG. _"You play any kind of game with the son of a bitch and he kicks your ass from here to Andromeda and back. I lost so much money..."

"Not surprising," Butler said. "You're the worst gambler I've ever met."

"I will accept 'bad gambler', but not 'worst gambler'."

"No? Remember that time you bet five thousand creds on Nasurn to win the Galaxy Cup?"

"I got great odds for that! 120:1!"

"And what was the score against Earth again? Six-nil? There's a _reason _you got great odds."

Erash clung stubbornly to his argument like a captain going down with his ship. "The refs were biased towards Earth. Just because you invented the stupid game–"

As they bickered, Mierin sat quietly in the middle, eyes fixed on the replay of his car dancing madly between rock pillars and through tiny fissures that almost skinned the paint off its hull. Garrus leant down next to the salarian and nudged him.

"How do you do that?" he asked. "How can you be that good if you've never played it before?"

"...it's easy," Mierin said with a shrug.

Garrus straightened up. "Fair enough. Maybe it's just that these two clowns are simple pickings."

"Yeah, go fuck yourself, Vakarian," Erash muttered. "There's some fights you just can't win."

That was true enough, Garrus reflected as he left the trio to their own devices. There was something about Mierin he found deeply unsettling. 'The Wall' was probably the single most accurate nickname he'd ever heard; the salarian seemed to be nothing but a labyrinth of impenetrable barriers and barricades, coiled in on themselves with impossible tightness. What lay behind them? What were they protecting? Sometimes he wondered if there was anything at all at the core of Mierin. Perhaps all the walls guarding it had choked and killed whatever lay there, leaving nothing but the mechanical, robotic exterior that sat on the couch. _Or maybe I'm completely wrong. Guy scares the crap out of me, though..._

But it wasn't just Mierin. There were days when dark doubts about all his team bubbled to the surface. Some days, it seemed to him that there was a sickness in all their hearts, encased in layers of armour and sarcasm and bravado but there all the same. Entropy. He could feel it within himself. He knew that neither he nor his team could fight forever, and it was that gnawing emptiness which threatened to consume him that he was truly afraid of. Like some parasitic insect, Omega had a habit of implanting a miniature replica of itself in anyone unfortunate enough to live there; Garrus could almost physically feel it within him, sapping away at purpose and belief and replacing them with a cold, ragged void.

_Well, you know what they say... you can take a man out of Omega, but you can't take Omega out of a man._

He'd been standing motionless for a full minute, eyes seeing the screen but not taking it in. Some new game was flashing away up there, showing heavily armoured Dust Age turian knights hacking away at each other with oversized broadswords as Butler and Erash flailed and Mierin effortlessly fended them off with neat, minimal motions. _They were right. They have no hope whatsoever._

There was a new smell in the air, and Garrus could hear something sizzling over the sound of clashing metal. He turned towards the kitchen, where Krul was standing over the gleaming stove. Strips of some kind of meat were frying in a pan, but the krogan's eyes were fixed on an ebook display his omnitool was beaming onto one of the cabinets.

Garrus squinted at the display. Without his visor, he had to rely on the slower auto-translation protocols of Krul's 'tool, and it took a moment for them to kick in and change the flowing, curved salarian text into turian letters.

"'Yet we cannot begin to discuss what is beautiful without a thorough understanding of what is ugly; just as there cannot be light without darkness or life without death, there cannot be art without its antithesis'," he read aloud. "Morbid."

"No less true for it," Krul said. He flipped the meat in the pan, eliciting a furious hiss. "Have you read it?"

"Not to my knowledge. What is it?"

Krul didn't look away from the slowly scrolling text as he spoke. "A dissertation attempting to create a synthesis of volus and salarian aesthetic philosophical traditions. They're remarkably similar in a great many ways."

Garrus cocked his head. "Can't say either was ever a major interest of mine."

Krul shrugged. "Why would they be? I knew nothing about volus art before I started reading this, and less about salarian art than I should."

"Then why read it?"

"I asked Melenis what he thought was the best thing he'd ever written. He said it was this."

"Melenis wrote this?" Garrus asked. "Spirits, I'd almost forgotten he did this sort of thing."

"So has he, in a way. He's taken his name off it. There's no record of the author anywhere on the extranet. All I can tell is that it was published by the Ten-Clan Academy something like thirty years ago."

_Before I was even born. Hm._

"I don't suppose we'll ever know his real name," he said. "I didn't know this was the kind of thing that interests you, though."

Krul paused. He slid open a cupboard, took out a small glass jar of a reddish spice Garrus didn't recognise and scattered some over the meat. A rich, heady smell rose up, and Krul inhaled deeply.

"I don't think it is," he said after a few seconds. "I understand that it _should _be interesting, but I can't connect with it. It may be beyond me."

It was Garrus's turn to shrug. "Well, it sounds like pretty in-depth academic stuff. Probably not meant to be for anyone but the kind of people who write this."

"I'm no neophyte, Garrus," Krul said, a note of testiness creeping into his voice. "I've been reading things like this for decades. It is simply... difficult. Difficult to engage with the text."

"Melenis's head always was a bit up his own cybernetic ass," Garrus said. He knew exactly where the conversation was going, and he was doing his very best to deflect it.

It was to no avail, as Krul lifted his massive head and slowly shook it. "No. Melenis is brilliant. I am not." _Ah, here it comes... _"Do you know how many krogan philosophers there are?"

"Three?" Garrus offered, then instantly regretted it. _Should have pleaded ignorance and got away._

"I fear even that is too high an estimate," Krul said. "Krogan philosophy is little more than childish platitudes about violence and murder. Krogan art is a joke. Attempting to use the krogan mind to understand the work of the volus is like shelling nuts with a sledgehammer."

Garrus punched the krogan on the shoulder. It was like hitting steel. "Hey, you understand this stuff a hell of a lot better than me."

"You are many things, Garrus, many admirable, remarkable, brilliant things," Krul said, "but you are not an intellectual."

Garrus couldn't help but smile at that. "Careful. You might just hurt my feelings."

"How unfortunate," Krul rumbled, and emptied the pan onto a plate. "It's true, though. You don't pretend to be one. Perhaps you're wiser than I am."

Garrus followed him over as Krul took a seat – one of the specially reinforced ones for him and Melenis – at the table and started to eat. On the screen, Butler's character was gorily disembowelled by Mierin's with one sweeping slash.

"If there is one thing in life not to do," Krul said between mouthfuls, "it's to pretend to be something you're not. I should know, I've spent centuries doing it. And I'll keep doing it, on the off-chance that I might be wrong. Perhaps the krogan can change his crest, as they say. Perhaps I can transcend my benighted species. And perhaps... well, almost certainly not..."

The giant trailed off and stared down at his plate, and just for a moment he looked terribly, terribly alone. In moments like this, it always struck Garrus just how perfect a partner Mierin was for Krul. _How many times has he heard something like this... and how many like him have there been before? A krogan can live for forty generations of salarians... and forty turian generations ago, we were fighting the Krogan Rebellions. Wrex lived back then. Strange to think he saw so many generations of my ancestors come and go. Perhaps Krul saw the same thing. We must seem a short-lived people to them._

_Can they ever truly relate to us? I wonder what's worse: living in isolation like that... or living __through dozens of generations of dead friends?_

"But I'm monopolising your time," Krul said eventually, and turned his attention back to the remains of the meat. "I'll leave you be."

Garrus was impressed. Usually, Krul venting his frustrations ended with something being broken. When he was finished, he let you know he was finished. Garrus stepped away from the table and, with one last glance towards the projection of the text that was still being beamed onto the cabinet, headed for Sensat's workshop.

"_**Mierin wins,**_" the game announced.

A blast of warm, dry air washed over Garrus as soon as he opened the door to the workshop. Sensat usually had the heating unit turned right up, claiming it helped him concentrate. As long as he paid the astronomical heating bills, Garrus didn't particularly mind.

The workshop was as cluttered and badly-lit as ever, except for the main workbench which sat under bright white fluorescent lights. Sensat was standing over it, frowning at a holographic projection of what looked like a synthetic arm of some kind. The arm itself was lying on the bench, trailing a forest of wires and neurofibre.

"Need a hand?" Garrus said, stepping over a coil of rubber tubing. "Sorry, that was terrible."

"Yes, it was," Sensat said. He unscrewed a vacuum flask and took a gulp. "What do you want?"

"I seem to remember that you have my visor. Or what's left of it, at any rate."

Sensat swiped away the hologram and set the flask down. "Ah, yes. I've made some minor improvements. Improved targeting, better magnification, anti-biotic mechanisms that actually work – well, hopefully..." He turned and rifled through piles of raw electronics on a desk behind him, muttering to himself, then flicked the visor back over his head. Garrus caught it and examined it. The familiar blue glint of the eyepiece winked up at him.

"Now, this time, don't fucking break it," Sensat said. "I may be asking the impossible, I realise, but give it a shot, hey?"

"Giving it a shot was what broke the last one," Garrus said.

"You _shot _it?"

Garrus raised his hands. "In my defence: a) I was drunk, and b) you told me it was bulletproof, and c) Sidonis was the one who actually shot it."

"Pity it wasn't on your face at the time," Sensat snapped. "Bullet-_resistant_. If you get hit at twenty paces, the integrated kinetic barriers should be able to deflect the bullet. If you get hit point-blank, you'd better hope your skull is as thick as it seems."

"The one before that wasn't even punch-resistant," Garrus said. He moved to put on the visor, but his fingers found an odd texture on the inside band. He lifted it up to the light and squinted.

"As requested," Sensat said. "All of our names, carved in. I've built in a miniature self-destruct mechanism so that we can destroy it if it falls into the wrong hands."

Garrus traced his finger along the tiny letters ringing the visor's frame.

_SIDONIS – ERASH – MELENIS – SENSAT – BUTLER – WEAVER – MONTEAGUE – RIPPER – GRUNDAN KRUL – MIERIN – VORTASH_

And in the middle, set above them all, just where the visor would cross his temple, were the words:

_ARCHANGELUS SUMUS_

Garrus gestured. "What does-"

"'We are Archangel'," Sensat said. "It's an old human language, Latin. Not even the etymological origin of the word 'Archangel', but it seems to have a special cultural meaning to the humans. Ancient wisdom, solemnity, and such. It felt appropriate."

"That's us in a nutshell," Garrus said, and slipped the visor over his head. As soon as it was in place, it felt like it had never been gone. "Solemn, ancient wisdom."

Sensat snorted. "Oh, absolutely. We're stone-cold professionals here. Oh, by the way, I found this while I was working on your new model." He held up another visor, noticeably bigger and clunkier. An old variant. The blue plastic over the eye had been shattered, leaving just a few shards clinging to the frame.

Garrus took it and turned it over in his hands. "This looks downright ancient."

Sensat grinned. "It's the model you were wearing when we first met. You can see exactly where Melenis punched your lights out."

"I'd almost forgotten that," Garrus murmured. There were even tiny traces of his own blood on the visor. "Seems so long ago."

"Very nearly two standard years," Sensat said. "We should have a party." He paused, then chuckled under his breath. "Remember those days? Latin of a different sort then. 'Deus Vult', 'Vox Dei' and all that. Our first grand adventure."

"Not that it was what either of us wanted at the time," Garrus said. _Was that really two S-years back? That's one and a half Palaven years... _"Remember when you nearly wiped out all of Omega?"

Sensat shrugged. "Every now and again, I find myself thinking that Golf had the right idea. Two years, and what's changed? We've annoyed them, we've harassed them, we've cost them money... and they're as strong as ever."

"So it seems," Garrus admitted. "Maybe they're weaker than they look, though. Maybe they're all about to come crashing down with one little push."

Sensat looked as if he was about to make some biting comment, then seemed to think better of it. "Yeah," he said, after a moment. "Maybe."

Garrus watched the light play on the shattered remnants of his old visor. "Strange to think of the old days. Not just Deus and Golf, but Saren, Sovereign... bigger days. Might not have been better, but they were bigger."

"I couldn't go back to them," Sensat said matter-of-factly. "That's not me any more. I've evolved. Grand, sweeping gestures are good for nothing. What problems can you solve with them? The world is small and complicated and fragile. It's a world for the lesser engineers, not the mad scientists; the standard infantry, not the heroes. Men, not gods."

Garrus grinned and tossed the old visor back. "Well, we put pay to gods."

Sensat caught it and stuffed it into a drawer. "That we did. Mel, how are you doing?"

"Almost complete," Melenis said. Garrus started at the sound of his voice and span towards its source. Melenis was standing against a wall, almost perfectly camouflaged by the dim lighting and the shelves upon shelves of mysterious equipment; he'd been in plain sight when Garrus had entered but had been so still and so well blended in that Garrus hadn't noticed him at all.

Looking closer, Garrus saw that Melenis's left arm was missing, detached at the shoulder. _Hell of a way to do a tune-up. _The volus's orange eyes were dimmed, which usually meant he was running some kind of VR program inside his mask.

Sensat called up a display on his omnitool and expanded it into a huge projection that took up half the room, all graphs and charts and data points that made absolutely no sense to Garrus. "I'm seeing minor improvement," he said, "but maybe not statistically significant. It's no worse, anyway. Finish up, and I'll run the new module."

"What're you working on?" Garrus asked, peering at the charts. "Wait, don't tell me. Is it a rollercoaster?"

"Standard performance tests," Sensat said. He thumped a fist against Melenis's thick chest armour. "Always room for improvement. The body needs a lot of maintenance, especially with our, hah, reduced resources."

He was lying. Garrus could tell straight away; it was something in the overly jovial way Sensat answered him, a flash of something odd in his eyes in the brief pause before he spoke. Garrus was no fool. He'd seen how Melenis's performance had slowly, subtly started to slip over the last few months, and he knew it wasn't just wear and tear on the hulking cybernetic form which contained the last remnants of the volus. The rot ran deeper. Too deep. Melenis was dying, and Garrus knew with a heavy certainty that there was nothing anyone could do about it.

_We've all got our cracks to paper over, but his are becoming ravines. How long can he last? Another year? And Sensat may be even worse. If he faces something he genuinely can't beat, how much damage will that do? How much of his drive will be gone?_

These grave concerns and more besides flickered through Garrus's mind as he watched Sensat manipulate and examine the data in the readout. Losing Melenis would be a blow, but a manageable one; his very existence tended to distort tactics and encourage laziness, though the number of times he'd single-handedly saved them didn't bear thinking about. Still, it could be withstood. Sensat, on the other hand... Butler was good, but his expertise was in comms, not engineering. The batarian was more key than even he probably thought.

"Garrus," Melenis said, jolting Garrus back to reality. "Weaver was looking for you earlier. I believe he wants your permission to do something ill-advised involving cars."

"Yes, that does sound like something Weaver would do," Garrus said thoughtfully. "Except for asking permission to do it. Just how ill-advised are we talking?"

"I do not know. Likely answer: 'considerably'."

"As long as it's not 'explosively'. I'll leave you guys to... whatever you're doing. I suppose I should go and make sure Weaver isn't going to kill us all."

"I knew you were good for something," Sensat said.

"Bite me, four-eyes," Garrus returned, and hit the button to close the door behind him before Sensat could get another word in.

They'd given up on video games. Images of a sport Garrus didn't recognise were playing instead, an asari and a female human hitting a ball back and forth across a low net with large stringed paddles. Garrus watched it for a few seconds before heading down to the garage.

Once through the door, he found Monteague sitting on the stairs. The human didn't seem to hear him; he was holding his hands strangely in front of him, his left higher than his right. Both were moving as if he were playing some imaginary instrument. It took a few seconds for Garrus to realise that was exactly what he was doing.

"Luc!" he called. Monteague didn't respond, so Garrus tapped him on the shoulder. Monteague stirred and hit a key on his omnitool, then raised the VR goggles Garrus hadn't even noticed he was wearing.

"Can I help you?"

Garrus nodded at his hands, encased in haptic gloves. "I didn't know you were the musical type."

Monteague smiled ruefully, and plucked an invisible string. "I'm not, really. I learned when I was a child, but I seem to have forgotten most of it." He entered a couple of commands into his omnitool, and a wireframe holographic model of a human-style acoustic guitar appeared in his hands. It played a clear, crisp chord when Monteague stroked his hand across where the string would be.

"Well, you'd be better than me," Garrus said, holding up his own hand. "Turians don't use string instruments all that often. Not enough fingers."

"I'd never thought about it," Monteague said, glancing down at his own. "It would be harder, I suppose. What do you do instead?"

Garrus shrugged. "Percussion, singing, that sort of thing. We were never the most musical people. You see a lot of big groups with a turian drummer, but that's about it. You should hear the drum parades they have on Unification Day back on Palaven, though. Sounds like an apocalypse you can dance to."

"If I can't dance, it's not my apocalypse," Monteague murmured. "You ever play yourself?"

"Some. A long time ago, though, and mostly military cadences."

"Hah! We've written hundreds of songs on military beats," Monteague said. "Elaine: play music: Wipe Out, Surfaris."

"Elaine?" Garrus said, as a heavy, driving beat started up.

Monteague paused for a moment. "It's the name I use for the VI in my 'tool," he said. "Now, listen."

The pounding of the drums echoed out through the emptiness of the room, reverberating from every corner. Garrus's fingers instinctively started drumming on his thighs; the beat was familiar, almost identical to one he'd played as a cadet. _Some things never change._

"Think you can play that?" Monteague said, and pulled a holographic drum out of his omnitool. He set it floating in front of Garrus, who experimentally pretended to strike it. The imaginary stick hit the imaginary drum and made a decidedly real sound.

Garrus grinned. "No. But I think I can try."

_Now, how did it go again?_

Decade-old training took over, and the make-believe sticks came crashing down. Years melted away, and Garrus was back on the parade ground on inspection day, feet stamping in unison with two thousand others, drums rattling and hammering away under clear golden skies. Monteague's guitar started up, now in a rougher, more distorted tone, and though both of them made a dozen mistakes or more, the rhythm took over and kept them booming along in unison until Garrus completely forgot his hands were holding nothing but air. And just for a few moments, he could forget about Omega, about the gangs, about all the problems in the world and lose himself in the music.

After a few wild, cacophonous minutes they drew to a close, both of them petering out almost at the same time. Garrus could feel the size of the smile on his face, and when he looked around, Monteague was wearing the widest grin that Garrus had ever seen on him.

"Ahh, that was invigorating," he said, and punctuated himself with a short, sharp chord. "I see what you mean about turian drummers. Thank you for that."

Garrus swiped the drum back into the ether and took a mock bow. "My pleasure. You're better than you give yourself credit for."

Monteague shrugged. "Well, I'll never be great, but I can still play. Just because you're going to hit a ceiling is no reason to stop."

"Very true," Garrus said, and coughed. "Spirits! That took it out of me more than an hour on a treadmill."

"Maybe we should start a band. I bet Mierin can play the keyboard."

"I don't think there's anything he can't do," Garrus said. "Now, I'll leave you to it. I've got to go and prevent Weaver from killing us all."

Monteague snorted with laughter. "Good luck. He's been down there for a few hours now. Every now and again I hear him swearing."

"Ominous," Garrus said, and carried on down the stairs. "If I die, avenge me."

"Only if you do the same," Monteague called after him.

As Garrus approached the door, he could hear the faint sound of pounding rock music behind it. When he opened it, it spilled out like a tidal wave, almost physically knocking him back.

He grimaced and set out into the garage. Rows of skycars, almost all of them stolen or salvaged on various missions, lined the walls, and a dented old heavy-duty RR8 sat in the middle of the floor, surrounded by oceans of parts and tools. Weaver was sat on top of it, wearing a thick welding mask and doing _something _that was obscured by a constant shower of sparks and cloud of smoke.

The song ended, and Garrus took advantage of the brief silence to shout Weaver's name. The big human looked up and waved as the next track started playing, electric guitar over huge, penetrating drum beats.

"_Here we stand, or here we fall; history won't care at all_," the singer belted out. Garrus tried to shout over the top of it, but he couldn't even hear himself. Weaver had gone back to whatever he was doing, but in the brief respite, some of the smoke had cleared to reveal what seemed to be an immense gun barrel mounted on top of the car.

_I don't know what I was expecting. Should have been that, though._

As Garrus approached, Weaver killed the welder and dropped down from the car. He lifted the mask, and Garrus tried to gesture to turn the music down. Weaver got the message after a few seconds and fiddled with his omnitool.

"_Oh, every night and every day, a little piece of you is falling aw-_" the singer continued, before being cut off mid-sentence. _I have a feeling I've heard that one before. Probably at the Spider._

"Morning, Garrus!" Weaver called. "Or afternoon. Whatever it is."

"Not sure myself," Garrus replied. "I've been told you're doing something loud and irresponsible, which sounded so unlike you that I had to come and see for myself."

Weaver spread his arms wide. "This, my friend, is the next evolutionary step in the field of car design!"

Garrus considered. "You put a big gun on it," he said, after a moment.

"Yes! But not just any big gun, oh no. Come with me." Weaver draped a huge arm over Garrus's shoulder and shepherded him towards his mutilated skycar. "How many times have you thought to yourself: if only I had some sort of huge weapon on my car to get rid of pursuers with?"

"Well, it did come up after we went after Tarak," Garrus admitted, "but we agreed that we'd never-"

"You see?" Weaver said triumphantly. "It's a dangerous world out there, and the only way to survive is to be even more dangerous yourself. Now, I took this cannon out of the reserve stocks of the _Hailfire. _In space, it's a pea-shooter. Anywhere else, and it's one mean motherfucker of a gun. I had to take out the back seats, of course, and the storage, and quite a lot of the engine-"

"That thing doesn't have an engine?"

Weaver looked a little put out. "Not _per se_, no. But that's just a momentary setback! The truth is, that gun makes the car so heavy its standard engine wouldn't even get the bastard off the ground. So, I'm going to cannibalise one of the heavy old Carathene haulers we got out of Harga's base and hook its engine into this chassis – might have some problems there, I'll probably need to expand it a bit – and then that's sorted. Complete. Once I've worked out the handling issues. It's a bit unstable at the moment. Very front-heavy. And top-heavy."

Garrus extricated himself from Weaver's grasp and walked around the car, examining the chipped and scratched bodywork and the messy welding job on the gun. "So it doesn't actually fly?"

"Not at the moment, no."

"So what you've basically got is... a very immobile gun. Which, if it does actually get off the ground, will immediately go into a nosedive."

"You're caught up in the present, Garrus," Weaver said airily. "It's all about the future. And I promise you, the Eaglehammer-"

Garrus folded his arms. "The Eaglehammer."

"-the Eaglehammer, yeah, will prove itself when given the chance."

"How many seats does it have?"

"I think I may have to settle on 'one'," Weaver said, tugging thoughtfully at his beard. "Unless I made some kind of sidecar."

"I think one seat will be just fine," Garrus said. "Your seat. As long as I'm not in it, you can do whatever you like. Just leave some cars for the rest of us, hey?"

Weaver brightened. "So you approve?"

"Whoa, let's not go crazy," Garrus said. "I don't disapprove as much as I feel like I should, but I'm a firm believer in the right to kill yourself through amusing stupidity. Do what you want. Just make sure you don't kill the rest of us."

"Ah, you were always good to me, Garrus," Weaver said, and clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to almost dislocate it. "You won't regret this."

"Unlikely," Garrus said. A thought crossed his mind, and he turned frowning to Weaver. "Have you seen Sidonis today? I saw everyone else upstairs, but not him."

"Not today. You checked everywhere?"

"No."

Weaver shrugged. "Could be hidden away somewhere upstairs. Knowing him, though, he's probably staggering back hungover from some girl's flat."

"Hah, yeah," Garrus said. "He'll turn up at some point."

"Actually, I do remember he did go off on his own last night," Weaver said. He picked up his welder and slid his mask back down. "After we left the Hyperion. Reckon he used the word 'azure'."

Garrus chuckled. "Yeah, that sounds like him. OK, I'll leave you to it. Try not to set fire to your beard."

"No promises!" Weaver called over his shoulder as Garrus walked away. Before he reached the door, driving rock music had already started up again, though this time the song booming out of Weaver's omnitool bore a darker, stranger tone.

"_This ain't the Garden of Eden; there ain't no angels above, and things ain't what they used to be, and this ain't the summer of love_-"

The door hissed shut behind him.

* * *

**III**

_**The Right Thing**_

* * *

To his surprise, Jaroth found that he was nervous. It annoyed him. He'd long since accepted the immense risks of what he was planning. A shot at a great victory necessarily brought with it a chance at abject failure, and he was completely willing to accept that. Jaroth had bet everything he had with no hesitation and no regrets, and that his body had the temerity to feel _nervous_ despite his peace of mind was aggravating.

He didn't believe this next step would take more than about twenty minutes. Lantar Sidonis had been difficult to track down – just as anyone was on Omega – but through deals and favours and bribes and even an exchange with the Shadow Broker, Jaroth had acquired a reasonably full psychological profile of the man from his younger days on Invictus, and even some records from his association with Vult. _Vult. A cautionary tale. So much can be lost, and so much gained..._

It should be easy. He knew where the buttons were, and coupled with his analysis of the Archangel paradigm, Jaroth estimated that he could get exactly what he wanted with ease. This would just be the first move in a long endgame.

A call popped up on his terminal. Jaroth answered it with a wave of his hand.

"Speak."

"Everything is in place, sir," his assistant said. "They're waiting for you."

"Good."

The call ended. Jaroth sat there for a minute more, contemplating the future. One wall of his office was entirely taken up with a vast oil painting, a near-perfect replica of Ghessechien's _Battlefield_. It depicted the dalatrasses of Lenona, Quaryon and Ululis; swathed in fine regalia, the three were meeting at a polished wooden table on a hill overlooking the bloody wreckage of the Battle of Nations. Jaroth personally regarded it as the pivotal moment in salarian history, the day when words and simple assassination failed and tens of thousands died to solidify the course of ages.

_Two thousand, seven hundred and eighty-eight years ago. It is fitting, I suppose, that so little changes. There will always be battles, and there will always be those who must die in service to a greater history. And there will always be those who stand in our way._

_I wonder. Will I be able to meet Archangel? Will I share a table with him, as Ululis and Lenona met with the Queen of Blades? Perhaps he would understand. Perhaps he would know why he has to die._

Jaroth rose, twitched his jacket into place, and headed out to make history.

Tarak and Garm were waiting for him in the antechamber, each flanked by their guards and each in full armour emblazoned with the colours and emblems of their respective organisations, as was Jaroth himself. The batarian threw Jaroth a sharp glare, though that was his normal custom, while Garm inclined his weathered head.

"Kept us waiting, Jaroth," the krogan grunted. "Didn't your mother ever teach you to be on time?"

"No," Jaroth said. "She did not. Remember your roles, gentlemen. You are here to provide a backdrop. Do not interrupt."

"This had better work," Tarak said. His fingers were tap-tap-tapping on his thigh with his characteristic impatience.

Jaroth permitted himself a thin smile. "Have some faith. Now, let us begin."

One by one, they filed through the door. As agreed, the guards stayed behind. They would not be needed.

The room beyond was bare. Its walls and floor were unadorned dark metal; a single light hung overhead, deliberately chosen for its dimness. The corners of the room were in shadow. Three chairs sat in front of them, and beyond that, the only other thing in the room was the fourth chair. And the turian chained to it.

"Hey, are you guys the room service? I ordered breakfast fucking hours ago," Sidonis said, as Garm and Tarak took their seats. Jaroth remained standing. He was leading the show, and he eased himself into the character he'd judged would break the turian. _Verbose. Dramatic. Energetic. Showy. Needlessly so, but so much rides on impressions and appearances. What __**is **__pales in comparison to what __**seems to be**__._

"I'm not here to play games," Jaroth said. _But it's all a game at heart._ "Your bravado is acknowledged. Please set it aside. This is a business meeting."

Sidonis glanced down at the stained undershirt he was wearing. "Could have given me a fucking chance to get dressed, eh?"

"We should begin with introductions," Jaroth said. He gestured behind him. "To my left you will see Mr Tarak, of Blue Suns fame – I believe your little organisation tried to kill him recently – and to my right is Mr Garm, leader of the Blood Pack here on Omega."

With no little satisfaction, Jaroth saw a flash of fear in the turian's eyes, though to his credit Sidonis maintained his bluster. _But he's thinking now. He knows who they are. He knows what this means. Three of the four most powerful people in Omega, in one room, looking at him. United. He knows he's a dead man. The trick is convincing him that he could be a live one._

Sidonis spat on the floor. "Very fucking charmed. You brought the bigwigs here just to kill little old me? You scared?"

Jaroth paused a moment before continuing. He used it to examine the turian. He'd been brought in without a fight – five instant sedative darts from hundreds of metres away had brought him down before he had a chance to understand what was happening to him – but somehow he still looked as if they'd roughed him up. The corners of his mouth were crusted, his eyes bloodshot, his clothes dirty. More important, though, was his face. Youthful, surprisingly so even though Jaroth knew the exact hour of his birth. Defiant, but Jaroth knew very well that it was a mask, and a brittle one at that. A mask he intended to break.

"My name is Jaroth," he continued. "I run the Eclipse on Omega. And you are Lantar Sidonis, born twenty-three years, three months, nine days and... ah, six and a half hours ago, give or take a few minutes, to Celtha Sidonis and an unknown father in Vedamor, Invictus, presently employed as a member of the vigilante group widely known as Archangel. Correct?"

The turian struggled to keep his face impassive, but Jaroth could see the mounting horror behind his eyes. He pressed the advantage while Sidonis was speechless.

"I can, if you want, provide a number of other records – your blood type is 5, for instance, and you were suspended from the Academy for improper conduct – but I believe you get the message. The fact of the matter is, Sidonis, that we know precisely who you are. With your DNA profile and the right contacts, we can find out a great many things. It's a small galaxy after all. But the question is: why haven't we just killed you yet?"

"Fuck you," Sidonis muttered.

Jaroth didn't blink. "We have every reason to. The Archangel issue has given us considerable trouble over the last year or so, quite considerable trouble indeed. Killing you would weaken the group. However, you can provide us with... information. You can walk out of here alive, and quite a wealthy man." Jaroth left the sentence dangling as bait, watching Sidonis intently to gauge his reaction. It was exactly as he'd expected.

Sidonis plastered a savage smile across his face. "If you cunts think I'm going to sell out my friends so that I can walk, you're even fucking stupider than I thought. You might as well kill me now. I'm giving nothing up. Nothing!"

Jaroth waved a dismissive hand. "Yes, yes, we expected that. I think you'll reconsider, though. Allow me to make a few things clear. Tell me, what is the goal of Archangel?"

"To kill slimy motherfuckers like you."

"To what end?"

"Because this place deserves better than you," Sidonis spat. "Every fucking shithole in the galaxy deserves better than you, you... fucking parasitic murdering bastards."

Jaroth smiled. "So, to help the people of Omega against their tyrannical overlords. Justice, in a word. Freedom, fairness, et cetera, et cetera. It's for the people you fight. Well, I should tell you something. If it is the people of Omega you serve – the man on the street, the family struggling to get by, the good people – if the phrase means anything at all here – who are kept down by the bad... if you want to help them, give up Archangel. The man, the team, both. Give us the location of the base and walk out of here alive. And-" Jaroth held up a hand as Sidonis began to speak – "please, let me explain."

He began pacing around Sidonis's chair, letting his footsteps ring out loudly.

"You see, the sad truth of Archangel is that it must fail. It cannot do otherwise. If Archangel were to succeed, it would require a wholesale rewrite of the nature of organic life. Omega _is _organic life. There will always be the cruel and the vicious and the greedy, and they will always ride roughshod over the weak and the meek and the kind-hearted, because such is the nature of the universe. If you had killed Tarak, someone just like him would have taken over. If Garm had fallen, a dozen others could have taken his place. If I died, I would be replaced inside an hour. There are so many like us, and we cannot be destroyed. We cannot be wiped out. You cannot kill all of us, because there will always be more of us. We will always exist. We are eternal. You literally cannot kill us fast enough."

Jaroth came around to Sidonis's front and squatted down in front of him, resting his elbows on his haunches.

"Of course, if you're committed to fighting until death, knowing that as long as you're making a small difference you can die happy, well, good!" he said. "Principles are so very rare these days. I don't have any myself, of course. They would get in the way. I can vouch for these two gentlemen as well; they are as amoral as they come, and you have my solemn word on that. We are villains. Monsters. Killers, robbers, tyrants, thugs... we are very bad men, Sidonis. We value power. Nothing else. And it is because we have no morals, no values, no ethics or anything of the sort that you cannot beat us, because we are willing to do so very many things. Whatever it takes, in fact."

Jaroth jumped up, flushed with the energy of his role, and turned to Tarak and Garm. "Gentlemen! We made an agreement, did we not? We identified the areas under our respective control which cost us more to police and keep in line than they return to us in revenue, correct?"

The two nodded in unison, and Jaroth whirled back to Sidonis.

"We totted up the numbers – had to make educated guesses for most of them – and we came up with about 30,000. Thirty thousand! Living off our money, they are. Now that's parasitism! And what is done with parasites?"

Jaroth leaned in closer, and smiled his best killer smile.

"They are _exterminated_."

The flash of horrified understanding in Sidonis's eye was observed, analysed and noted before it had faded away a split-second later. "You're lying," the turian said, almost confidently. "You would never destroy potential revenue."

"Not unless it gained us something more in return," Jaroth replied. "Holo, please."

In the next room, someone pressed a button, and a hologram of a smallish tower block in Braga District appeared in mid-air, rotating gently.

"We think about three thousand people live in this building," Jaroth said. "It costs us money to operate. We continue to do so simply because we are loathe to abandon territory. But we maintain absolute control over the doors... and the windows... and the power... and the air supply. If I gave the order, I could have all of them dead in five minutes. But I wouldn't be so dull as to kill them all at once. I'd go by floor, one by one by one from 35 down to Basement 2, and more and more would die each time. And you could watch! This is a very smart program. It can show you which floors I've killed. In fact..."

Jaroth peered at the hologram, considering.

"Let's take... hmm. Eighteen. Never liked the number. Yes, let's kill eighteen. Drain the air, crank the heat up to 100 centigrade, and seal every entrance and exit tight. Oh, and give me internal camera feeds. Live."

"Wait, wait," Sidonis said – _ah, and the panic bubbles to the surface_. "Don't do this, you don't have to do this, this is _murder_-"

"That's the idea," Jaroth said cheerfully. Miniature screens popped up in mid-air all around the hologram, displaying corridors and apartments, eating areas and lounges. Most were run-down; many were abandoned. Many weren't. "Fire away."

"No," Sidonis whispered, "no, stop it..."

On the screens, a sudden gale erupted from nowhere, blasting everything not nailed down out of place as the air screeched away into vents and grates all across the floor. Jaroth watched impassively as people screamed silently, clawed at their throats, shied away from locked doors and blasts of scalding air from the heating units.

In the food court, chaos broke out. Tables were upended and chairs scattered as the inhabitants desperately looked for safety which wasn't there.

In one of the lounges, two batarian children playing on a makeshift slide built from an old door grabbed at their throats and quietly choked.

A dozen residents tried their comm units and found the entire section electronically blacked out.

A dozen more made it to exits and spent their last moments scrabbling bloodily at them.

An old turian with a walking frame lost her balance as the winds blasted away and tumbled down a flight of stairs, only stopping when she hit the sealed door out.

A handful of lucky paranoiacs managed to get into a pressure suit before the last of the air was sucked away, but they were only a few. Perhaps a hundred hadn't been so lucky.

"Of course, the ones in the suits will die as well," Jaroth said. "They'll run out of air, or maybe their cooling systems will fail. Just a matter of time. Lose the feed."

The screens winked out. A moment later, the eighteenth floor of the block was highlighted in a stark red.

"Fuck you," Sidonis said quietly. His head was hanging low. "Fuck you all."

"Consider that a statement of intent," Jaroth said. "We are murderers. We have no shame in that; it is simply something that we do. So, here is the situation: my estimate is that we just killed about a hundred people. We have another twenty-nine thousand nine hundred to get through, and those are just the ones who cost us money to keep alive. But we won't stop there. There are places where we only make marginal profits. We haven't quite done the maths yet, but I'd estimate that's another... oh, half a million people? Something in that region. All of them on the chopping board."

Sidonis started to laugh, deep gulps of laughter that were close to sobs. "You're fucking insane. You're a fucking mad psychopath!"

"If you like," Jaroth said, shrugging. "Labels are unimportant. What you have to realise is this: we will do it. And if you're thinking that maybe that was all faked footage, that we haven't really killed anyone... bring in the first."

Sidonis stared up at him. "The first what?"

"The first... more tangible demonstration," Jaroth said. "Just to prove our point."

The door slid open, and two of his guards frogmarched a handcuffed, hooded turian into the room and forced them to their knees in front of Sidonis. Jaroth nodded to them, and they ghosted away again.

Jaroth reached down and removed the hood. This would be what would break Sidonis, he was certain of it. He'd made his selection carefully. The turian was teenaged, female, and had identical facial markings and skin tone to the regimental commander's daughter who was the reason Sidonis had been suspended from the Academy on Invictus eight years ago. _Every man has a lever._

"What is your name?" Jaroth asked.

To her credit, the turian girl held her composure. _Most street rats do. _"H-Helas."

"How old are you?"

"Fifteen... please, I-"

Jaroth drew his pistol and shot her in the back of the head.

"Now," he said, as Sidonis shouted and raved and strained madly against his restraints, "is my point made?"

He holstered the pistol again and sat down, tossing the hood onto the girl's body. For two minutes he sat there, waiting for Sidonis to exhaust both his vocabulary and himself, and at length his hollering faded into a quieter, slower stream of curses.

"Fuck you. Fucking murderer, fucking burn in hell..."

"We have more, you know," Jaroth said. "Only about twenty on hand, but we can easily acquire more. So, I will make this very simple. Either you will do the right thing and give up Archangel, thereby saving thousands of lives – not to mention your own – or you will sit here and watch the people you could have saved die. Thirty thousand in the tower blocks. We're willing to kill them all. Twenty more in front of you. And this girl was lucky; I gave her a quick death. I have on my payroll several people who specialise in very slow, very painful deaths. We have machines. Blades. Drugs. Tools. Fire. Acid. Vorcha. We can conceive of any number of terrible fates, and we will make you watch as we inflict them. And if you will not watch, rest assured that you will hear. Who knows? Perhaps we'll even let you taste."

Sidonis said nothing. His eyes were closed, his jaw tightly set. _Almost there._

"You have lost, Sidonis," Jaroth said softly. "Archangel has lost. Archangel lost the moment it stood against us, because we are not fettered. We will do anything. All this pointless fight against us is doing is killing the people you wanted to protect, and there's absolutely no way you can win. Your goals cannot be achieved against people like us. So admit it. Hold your head high; you fought the good fight, and you fought it better and longer than anyone would ever have expected. But it's over now. You know Archangel's destruction is inevitable. If you give them up now, you can save thousands of lives, and you can freely leave Omega knowing that in the end, when the last choice was put to you, when you were asked to choose between the lives of a handful of vigilantes or those of half a million innocent people... _you did the right thing._"

Slowly, with tears in his eyes, Sidonis looked up, and Jaroth smiled.

* * *

**IV**

_**To the Future**_

* * *

About an hour into the party, when everyone was suitably drunk, Garrus stood up from his place at the head of the table. Most of the team went silent, except for Weaver, who was still in the middle of telling a confused but unmistakeably filthy joke to Butler.

"Shut your mouth, ape," Monteague said, and jabbed him with a fork. A wave of good-natured laughter rolled around the table as Weaver squealed in surprised pain.

"Thank you, Luc, for ensuring that he got the point," Garrus said, to more laughter.

"Could have just said something," Weaver grumbled. He downed the rest of his glass in one and fumbled for the wine bottle.

Garrus smiled as he looked down the length of the table, past the ruins of the food that had been set out, past the scrupulously untouched cakes, past the innumerable bottles of innumerable alcohols, and to the eleven faces looking up at him.

"Let me tell you a story," he began.

"Quick, somebody shoot him!" Erash called.

"Didn't you already try that?" Ripper replied, and the ceiling shook with laughter. Garrus raised his hands, trying and failing to keep a straight face, and slowly quiet descended on the table.

"Two standard years ago to this day, I was sat in a chair in a dark room full of people who wanted to kill me. And look at me today! Now I'm standing up!"

Garrus waited for the laughter to subside again. "Settle down, kids. Settle down! Yes, I was there, alone, and I'm damned if I didn't think I was a dead man. I'd set foot on Omega for the first time about a month earlier, and to be honest I was lucky I lasted that long. I got mixed up in some very complicated and absurdly dangerous business, and for reasons we agreed not to discuss, most of you are lucky to be alive. Even the ones I didn't know at the time. Yes,_ especially _you, Weaver. And I wouldn't have lived if not for Sidonis, for Erash and Melenis, and for Sensat... although it was also kind of his fault in the first place."

"Entirely my fault," Sensat corrected, grinning. "Sorry about that."

"Ah, we forgive you," Erash said. "Almost."

"All in the past now," Garrus said, waving a hand. "So, we survived. And, for reasons that seemed valid at the time, we formed a team. We didn't have a name, or even a clear goal; we were just doing what I'd done before I met any of them. We tried to make a difference. We tried to do the right thing. And we did! We wiped out the Shadows, all drug-tainting bastards to a man, and set up shop here. We gained reinforcements. Butler was the first. Weaver and Monteague, the next two. Ripper. Mierin, Krul. Vortash. We all knew something had to be done on Omega, and we knew we couldn't do it alone."

Garrus paused, and swayed a little at the table. He was drunk, he knew that, but manageably so. If anything, it was helping him free his tongue. _And here they are, hanging on my every word. Was this how it felt to be Shepard?_

He cleared his throat and went on. "We saw Omega for what it was. This place is... black. Evil. It's the breeding ground for most of the crime across the Terminus Systems. It's a station ruled by warlords and drug dealers, people who reward their own kind and step on all the civilians and all the innocents who are unlucky enough to live here. There are no laws here, no protection for the people from their rulers. It's a darkness without hope, without light, without anything to dream of... except for us. That's what we are. We're the candle in the darkness. We're the lighthouse in the middle of stormy seas. They call us Archangel, and that's a role we know we have to take, because nobody else will. And we fought a fight that looked impossible. And we're still here!"

A deafening cheer went up around the table, fists punching the air and drink spilling all over the place. Even Melenis and Mierin had joined in, and Garrus shouted over the noise and hubbub.

"We're still alive! Two years in the darkest pits of hell, and they can't bring us down! They can't stop us! Two years of us slaughtering their men, destroying their shipments, costing them millions, and we're still here! And all the power of every demon and devil they can bring to bear isn't enough to bring down the angels, because there _is _hope! There _is _something worth fighting for, something worth living and dying for! We're the walking, talking proof! There's something pure and beautiful in the darkest depths of the blackest night, and it's _us_!"

Garrus had had a rough speech outline, but it was long since forgotten. His heart was pouring itself out through his mouth now, bypassing his brain and any feelings of self-consciousness or embarrassment he might have felt, and a strange kind of ecstasy was building in him. They felt it too, and he was shouting over a constant round of cheering and hollering.

"So when they say it's impossible for us to win, when they say we're doomed beyond a shadow of a doubt, when they say that Archangel will fall – we point to a thousand bodies in our wake, and we tell them that we will not surrender! We will not give in! We will fight with everything we have for as long as we can, and we will show them what it means to stand in the way of justice! In the way of freedom! In the way of the right thing! Omega can be redeemed! Omega can be saved! And so, a toast!"

He grabbed the nearest bottle and raised it high as shouts of 'a toast!' echoed around the table.

"To Omega!"

"**To Omega!**"

"To Archangel!"

"**To Archangel!**"

"And to the future!"

"**To the future!**"

"So, friends, eat! Drink! And be merry! Because this is just the beginning!"

Garrus put the bottle to his lips and drank deeply, and all around him the room exploded in a wild chaos of cheering and shouting and singing, with every inhibition and restriction thrown clean away and undiluted rapture ringing out all throughout the base. Then he was sitting down, being congratulated and toasted from all sides, and the smile never left his face.

Some time later – he didn't know how long, but at least an hour or two – people had split up. Erash and Ripper were dancing on a coffee table to loud, booming music; Vortash and Monteague were playing holographic table tennis in the foyer; Mierin was sitting on Krul's shoulders, trying to knock Ripper off Melenis's; and Sensat and Butler were arguing passionately about some movie or other in the kitchen.

Garrus staggered back from the bathroom and returned to the table, gazing over the ruins of the meal, the last scraps of cake, and a forest of empty bottles. He was slowly sobering up. Sidonis was still sat there as well, steadily drinking his way through bottle after bottle.

"Hey," Garrus said. Sidonis didn't hear him over the music, so Garrus grabbed a half-eaten bread roll from the table and threw it at him. Sidonis looked around just in time and caught it in mid-air. "You OK?"

"Yeah," Sidonis called back. "Yeah. I'm good."

Garrus gestured upstairs. "Quieter up there. Come on."

He headed for the stairs, and after a few moments Sidonis followed him.

The music faded to a level where it could comfortably be spoken over by the time Garrus reached the balcony overlooking the bridge. He leaned on it, looking into the twilight. Sidonis emerged a few seconds later and slumped down with his back to the wall, the bottle still in his hand.

"You sure you're OK?" Garrus said.

Sidonis looked down at the bottle. "Yeah, I'm fine. Drinking too much, maybe."

Garrus chuckled. "Not like you to miss a party. Or to believe in drinking too much."

"First time for everything," Sidonis muttered. He took another swig, set the bottle down and gazed up at the ceiling. "Two years, huh?"

"Exactly two," Garrus said. "Happy anniversary. It doesn't feel like it, does it? Seems like just a few months..."

Sidonis shook his head. "Feels like five years to me. Longer, maybe. I can't remember much else. Vult... that's all just memories, and hazy ones. Invictus is just a shadow. Feels to me like I've spent every day of my life on this station. Fighting to stay alive."

"No need to fight today," Garrus said. "We can relax. Kick back, enjoy the view. Can you believe it? You can see halfway across Omega from here. Hell, you can even see where we met, just about. Way off in the distance, that's the billboard over the club. Still going. Guess nothing really changes. Hey, remember when we went back there last year, you know, the first year we'd been here? And you drank that whole bottle of quarian ale in one, you were throwing up half the night..."

Sidonis snorted with laughter. "Yeah. You said not to, but hey, I said, I'm young, I can handle it. If you're not gonna live when you're young, when the fuck are you gonna do it, huh?"

"And they had no idea that we were the guys who killed everyone in there just one year before," Garrus said, and broke off into fits of silent laughter. "Oh, man! That was so damn stupid. If they had some kind of facial recognition stuff we might have been killed."

"But they didn't, and we weren't," Sidonis said. "We're still alive, huh?"

"Yeah. Still alive. Came damn close a few times, though. Any of us could have died a dozen times over, but we didn't. Always managed to dodge the bullet. Charmed lives."

"Charmed lives," Sidonis echoed. "And that's what we've got. Two years of survival. Not much else."

"Come on," Garrus said, "we've done well, we-"

"No," Sidonis said. "We haven't. We haven't changed a thing. We kill one man and another pops up to replace him. Smash one gang, and another slides in before the end of the night. Sometimes... fuck, sometimes I just wonder what's the fucking point of all this."

Garrus let himself slip down the wall until he was sitting opposite Sidonis. "We do what we do because if we don't, nobody else will do it. People will die who could have been saved."

"Can't save everyone," Sidonis said. "We have to learn that. We can't do it all. Maybe we're even making it worse in the long run. Can you say for sure that we're not?"

Garrus didn't respond for ten seconds or more. Then: "No. The galaxy isn't that black and white. Much as I'd like it to be. I swear, if someone came along and made all the choices nice and neat and binary – black and white, red and blue, good and bad, right and wrong – it'd be a better world we live in. Sometimes I can't tell if there's even a choice. And too many times there's no right path. So many roads end in death."

"You said it," Sidonis said, and downed the rest of the bottle. "Ah. But we all gotta do what we gotta do. And you're right. We do the right thing."

Garrus smiled. "Glad to hear it. You've been through too much to ever doubt that."

Sidonis looked up at Garrus, and something flickered momentarily behind his eyes. In that moment, Garrus thought he might have caught a glimpse of some furious internal battle raging inside Sidonis's head – but the moment passed, and Sidonis stood up abruptly.

"Live while you're young," he repeated. "Hell, I can drink a little more. Strategy meeting in two days, right?"

Garrus nodded, and Sidonis grinned.

"Plenty of time, then."

And then Garrus was sitting there alone.

* * *

**Ω**

_**This Is The Way**_

* * *

This is the way it ends.

There's only quiet conversation over the table. Eleven seats are occupied; one is empty. Garrus glances at it again, then checks his omnitool. No word from Sidonis. They've been waiting for him fifteen minutes now. Garrus hasn't seen him since they talked on the balcony.

"We could just start," Erash murmurs to him. "Sidonis won't mind. We can update him if he shows up."

"We'll give him another five minutes," Garrus says, knowing that this is exactly what he said five minutes ago. Erash nods and withdraws, leaving Garrus to the faint anxiety beginning to squirm in his stomach. _He knew it was today, he knew the time..._

Two minutes later, Garrus receives the call. He feels slight relief when he sees that it's Sidonis, and answers it.

"Sidonis. Don't you have somewhere to be?"

"Sorry," Sidonis says, in slightly hushed tones, "but I've been tracking this guy for hours now."

"Guy?"

"It's a Blue Sun lieutenant. Plain clothes at the moment, but I know it's him. He came out of one of their HQs a few minutes back. We can take him out right now, but I don't have a rifle. I'm not far away. Want to engage?"

"We'll head over," Garrus says, standing up. "Where-"

"I think this is a one-man job," Sidonis interrupts. "One shot, one kill. Extra manpower just complicates it, and this is a Suns district. Just you should be plenty."

Garrus pauses for a moment, then ignores the little voice at the back of his head telling him something isn't quite right. "Sure. Give me the coordinates and I'll be right over." He looks up from the call to the rest of the team. "Sorry, boys. This might take a while. Stay here, but relax."

He's already in combat armour; it's a second skin for him now, as well as the closest thing the team has to a uniform. The rest of them are equally armoured and armed. He leaves them behind, though, and picks up his rifle from the table.

"Sure you don't need a hand?" Vortash asks.

Garrus smiles and shakes his head. "Not that kind of job, I think. See you soon."

He jogs down to the garage and selects a car – staying carefully away from Weaver's modified flying tank – and jets away into the glimmering darkness of Omega. The coordinates have come through from Sidonis's end; like he said, they mark out a location deep in Suns territory. Garrus calls up a map and plans his next move; he'll land on a high building nearby with good line of sight and get Sidonis to act as spotter. This will be the first time he tries out the new visor in a combat scenario, which gives him a little thrill of anticipation. _Look at me. A grown man excited to try out his new toy. Some things never change._

Omega flashes past the windows, a neverending blur of twilight speckled with streaks and spots of brightness. It's quiet in the car. All Garrus can hear is the quiet hum of engines.

He circles around the building he's chosen and brings the car down. He gets out, rifle in hand, and calls Sidonis.

There is no response. He frowns and waits, wondering if the signal is somehow being interrupted. He tries again on Butler's special bands. Again, no response.

Garrus walks to the edge of the building and looks down. Darkness yawns beneath him, crisscrossed by walkways and elevated streets. A few people wander along them. Sidonis is nowhere in sight.

He steps back and double-checks the coordinates on his omnitool, unease growing within him. He's in the right place. Sidonis isn't. Could he have done something foolish? Garrus tries reaching him once more, and then a warning flashes in his visor.

**[WARNING: SNIPER LOCK-ON]**

Garrus reads it, uncomprehending, and then the meaning hits him. He hurls himself down with a millisecond to spare; the shot hits his shield and drives him flat into the ground, but it's only a glancing blow. Instinct kicks in, and his rifle is already at his shoulder. His visor identifies the incoming bullet path and draws him a sharp blue line to aim along, and within a second of bringing his eye to the sights, he fires. On a rooftop four hundred metres away, a salarian drops dead with a hole punched through his forehead.

"What the hell?!" Garrus hisses, and jumps to his feet. The door to the skycar is still open. He sprints for it, just as another warning pops up in his visor. He hurls himself inside, and a bullet punches through the car centimetres away from him and out the other side. "Fuck!"

Garrus hunches down as low as he can and starts the car, wrenching it sideways as soon as it leaves the ground. Another bullet holes the back window, and a fourth cracks through the space where his head had been two seconds earlier. The car pitches alarmingly before he can right it, and then he's away, pushing the throttle as wide open as it will go as the door hisses shut. He knows how lucky he is to be alive. _That was a planned hit. That was... a trap..._

* * *

_This is the way Melenis dies._

_He's the first to notice. The base's proximity alarms are hooked directly into his HUD, but when the first one is tripped, he thinks nothing of it. He assumes it was Garrus. A second later, he remembers that Garrus went via the garage. He switches to the cameras, and he sees a wall of death coming their way._

"_We're under attack," he says, magnifying his voice to drown out all conversation, and he triggers his combat form. His limbs extend and his body mass reorganises itself until he stands seven feet tall. He knows this will not be enough._

_All around him, the others are stirring from the table as if in slow-motion. Melenis ignores them. He has to buy them time. And he knows how he'll do that._

_He scoops up his HMG from where he had leant it against the wall and charges out through the foyer and onto the bridge. They are already coming across it. The krogan and vorcha of the Blood Pack lead the attack. Blue Suns snipers and support troopers back them up. Eclipse biotics provide cover from the flanks._

_But it is all one bridge, and Melenis has a very large gun._

_He does not think about ammunition. He will not live long enough to run out. The fact comes as something of a relief to him. A quick, violent death has always been preferable to a slow fade into useless senility. He simply fires, sweeping the barrel from left to right._

_Waves of them fall before him. They return fire, and his shields are overwhelmed in seconds. His left leg is blown out, and he goes down to his knees, still firing. As he does so, he murmurs the activation phrase for the self-destruct he insisted Sensat build into his systems. A five-second countdown appears in his HUD. He wonders if he will live long enough for that to kill him._

_His torso is chewed away by a hail of gunfire. One arm falls, useless. The other keeps the gun trained on the attackers, but they are so many, and they are closing too fast._

_With one and a half seconds left, a bullet enters through his left eye, drags a trail of bloody destruction through the last few organic parts of Melenis, and kills him._

_He slumps forward as the ranks close around and over him. A moment later, the last remains of the weary old volus are engulfed in fire and scattered on the air._

* * *

"Come on," Garrus growls at the skycar as it speeds away from the rooftop which was very nearly his grave. He has no idea what happened. A dozen contradictory possibilities run through his mind, but only in the last does he begin to suspect.

_It was a trap. That was set up. Multiple snipers covering from multiple angles... I'd be dead if not for that new feature. Sidonis breaking the old visor saved my life._

_Sidonis... could they have intercepted the call? No, it's too soon, the response was too fast, and it was encrypted. They knew beforehand._

_He couldn't have..._

* * *

_This is the way Mierin dies._

_As soon as Melenis shouts the warning, he and Krul are moving into formation. The volus charges out of the door and they follow, guns at the ready. When Mierin catches sight of what lies ahead, he realises that he has very little chance of escaping alive. STG training kicks in, and he projects his biotic barrier. It blossoms out like a bright blue flower, and Krul and Weaver take cover behind it as Mierin advances down the bridge._

_They are firing into the oncoming ranks, around the form of Melenis. His machine-gun is clattering away and spitting fire and death, but at least as much is coming back his way. Mierin watches as he stumbles, goes to his knees, and finally falls, a bullet streaking through his head. A second later, the body explodes, hurling some of the attackers off the bridge and killing a dozen or more. But still they come, guns blazing, and Mierin shudders with the effort of keeping his barrier in place. As soon as it falls, all three of them are dead._

_A rocket crashes against it and spews fire back towards the front ranks, straining Mierin's abilities to their very limit. He has always suspected his death will come like this. It does not bother him. Death comes to everyone. Mierin wonders what it holds in store. Perhaps he can save some of the others if they are wise enough to flee, though, and he keeps the barrier up as long as he possibly can. His amp begins to overload, cooking the flesh in the back of his neck, and agonising pain races down his arms as his blood churns in his veins. His whole body glows blue. Every inch of him exudes biotic power, and it is a miracle that his barrier lasts as long as it does._

_But it falls, and Mierin falls with it, dropping to his knees in utter exhaustion. He draws a pistol and fires aimlessly into the front ranks, dropping a vorcha and a krogan before a wave of firepower shatters his kinetic barrier and riddles him with bullets. He collapses on his back, and the last few seconds before he loses his vision are painless. The rock sky gives way to rolling blue, then white, then black._

* * *

"Answer me!" Garrus screams at the comm unit. Butler has not taken his call. Neither has Sensat. "Come on!"

He hammers a fist against the dashboard and urges the car onwards with all its power. It will never be fast enough. Deep inside, he already knows the truth. That he has been betrayed.

* * *

_This is the way Krul dies._

_He follows Mierin the way they've always done before, and as the barrier crackles into life, he sees death beyond it. There is no escape this time. No miraculous last-second saviour, no brilliant piece of quick thinking to save the day. He will not live longer than thirty more seconds._

_Krul has lived for centuries. Krul has seen everyone he has ever loved waste away and die, living their entire lives in a few percent of his lifespan. Death holds no grand mystique for him. If it's good enough for everyone I know, he reasons, it's good enough for me. He resolves to make his last moments count._

_He throws caution to the wind and leans out from behind the barrier, firing his massive shotgun as fast as he physically can. It even comes with a 'last stand' mode; it gains him a few more shots at the cost of irreparably ruining the gun's cooling systems. He activates it, and continues firing. Melenis falls ahead of him and erupts into a fireball, holding back the front line for a couple of seconds, but even as the blood rains from the sky the next wave is coming, and the fire is relentless on both ends. The barrier is failing, and Mierin screams with the effort of maintaining it - he keeps it up longer than Krul could ever have expected, but it comes crashing down, and Krul watches another friend die._

_And now, at last, he knows what it means to be krogan._

_His body quakes with fury as he charges forward, shredding a row of attackers with his last few shots, and he hurls the useless gun aside. He grabs a salarian by the throat and crushes it, tossing the body away, bodily picks up a vorcha and sends it screaming to its death over the side of the bridge, caves in a human's skull with one massive headbutt. He does not feel the pain of a hundred gunshots eating away his body. Only when he finds he can no longer stand does he even realise he has been shot. He launches himself forward with the very last of his strength, wraps his arms around the nearest krogan and heaves them both to the side, towards the edge of the bridge. The krogan roars in his face and Krul howls back, his vital blood pouring from his mouth, and to his immense satisfaction, the other krogan looks terrified._

_It was worth it just for that, he thinks, and then they are over the side of the bridge and falling, falling, falling..._

* * *

Garrus can feel tears of helpless rage and fear stinging his eyes as the car screams on through the twilight. Only now, at the end, does he begin to understand. How can he have Sidonis? He isn't thinking straight, but dozens of hints and strange turns of phrase, expressions, things almost said and forgotten rise up to haunt him, and he curses his own stupidity. He tries Butler again. No response.

* * *

_This is the way Weaver dies._

_He has always thought that Archangel would be the death of him. Only when faced with the cold reality of that does he understand how right he was._

_He follows Mierin and Krul out after Melenis, his Revenant at the ready. The sight of the army storming the bridge strikes icy fear into his heart. There is no surviving such a force._

_The certainty of death rises up and swamps the fear, driving it away. Why be scared of what cannot be avoided, he thinks to himself. Embrace it. Live your last moments with no regret. No fear. No doubt. And take as many of the bastards with you as you can._

_Weaver unleashes the Revenant on the horde. It is the perfect gun for the situation. Accuracy is irrelevant. Every shot hits a target, and Weaver has a lot of shots. He finds himself shouting incomprehensibly as he fires, feeling every kick of the gun back into his shoulder. Ahead, Melenis falls and explodes, and Weaver mentally salutes the big man. It is a death to be proud of._

_When the barrier falls and Mierin with it, Weaver's shields last about two seconds. Then they are gone, and bullets riddle his body. His shoulder takes another - the same damn shoulder! - and he staggers back, but he has no need for that arm, or his legs, or his eyes. He just needs to keep his finger down on that trigger. Bombs of numbing pain explode throughout him as the bullets rip him to shreds. Distantly, he sees Krul grapple another krogan off the bridge._

_Long way down, he thinks, and then he pitches forwards, his legs shot out from under him. His finger won't let go of the trigger. His sight is fading. He cannot hear the gunfire. He cannot feel any part of his body. But he is still firing._

_It would have greatly pleased him to know that he held the trigger so tightly that he killed three men after his own death._

* * *

Garrus's car blasts on through the darkness. He knows he is too late. He has always been too late. Two years too late.

* * *

_This is the way Ripper dies._

_A part of him is already dead. Some died when he joined the Cabals and left behind his name, his face. Some died with the rest of V-33._

_He knows what is left of him will die today. With Archangel._

_Melenis is killed before his eyes as he races around the corner towards the bridge. Seconds later, as the clouds of smoke and blood clear, the barrier fails and Mierin collapses. Krul falls. Weaver dies._

_Ripper goes to work._

_He has often wondered how he would react to death. He had thought about it, and concluded he would face it without fear. He finds he was right. He has long since accepted that he is nothing but a tool to be put to use. And he considers Archangel the highest cause he could give his life for._

_His vortexes rip and tear their way through the front lines. Blood and limbs arc through the air, wrenching screams from their former owners, and the chaos he wreaks buys him a few seconds. Through the mist of red and blue and green and orange, he sees white flashes and hears the rattle of guns, and his shields are ripped away in seconds. Other biotic flashes send troops tumbling through the air and off the side of the bridge to fall to their deaths, and out of the corner of his eye Ripper sees Butler alongside him._

_The end comes quickly for Ripper. A lucky bullet catches him in the throat, and he falls, choking on blood. Another strikes him in the temple, and ends him. His final thought is a silent moment of gratitude that this time, he will not be the lone survivor._

* * *

Warning lights blaze all around the car as Garrus pushes it far beyond safety limits. The engines wail in protest. Garrus grips the controls so hard that the duraplas begins to buckle under his armoured fingers.

* * *

_This is the way Monteague dies._

_He watches Melenis fall. Mierin. Krul. Even Weaver. All dead._

_Adrenalin replaces emotion. He charges forward as Ripper begins to obliterate the front line of the assault, and does what he can. He has come too far to turn back, and he doesn't want to in any case. His biotics blare beneath his skin, and he takes the path of least resistance: plucking people up and tossing them over the sides of the bridge. The bottleneck saves his life for a few seconds._

_He snatches up a batarian in blue armour and sends him spiralling to his death, and old memories punch their way back to the surface. It's Elysium. Monteague stands panting over blackened ruins, gun in his hand and a dead batarian under his feet, and he feels nothing but pure, undiluted hatred._

_His life has already ended once, he reasons. The second time cannot be nearly as bad._

_The attackers are collapsing into bloody carnage as Ripper wreaks havoc on them, but his biotics abruptly dissipate as he finally goes down. Monteague's own shields are gone, and when he glances down he sees bullet holes in his stomach, leaking blood down his armour. He doesn't feel them._

_With dying strength, he hauls a struggling krogan into the air and shunts him bodily sideways, smashing against and over the barrier at the side of the bridge, and then slumps down and sideways. He rolls onto his back and realises he cannot breathe._

_The rock overhead turns into a war-torn sky, kissed by fiery explosions as the batarian ships burn. Elaine is on one of them. But she's also kneeling over him, stroking his head, whispering something. As the light fades, Monteague sets foot in Elysian fields one last time._

* * *

Garrus can see the firefight from half a klick out. Plumes of fire and smoke and biotic power crackle around the bridge like a lightning storm, and through it all he sees the dreadful white blasts of gunfire.

* * *

_This is the way Sensat dies._

_When Melenis cries the attack, he doesn't know what to do but sit there as the table erupts into frenzied, shouted activity around him. He has fought and killed before, but he has never been a soldier._

_Then Erash grabs him by the collar and physically drags him into cover by the door, and Sensat catches a distant glimpse of the unstoppable army bearing down on them. In that moment, he knows. He understands. He accepts. And he can fight._

_He draws his pistol and takes careful aim. To his side, Erash is lobbing grenades over their falling comrades and into the mix. Melenis is already dead, and Sensat feels a soul-numbing stab of despair at the loss of his best, oldest friend. As he watches, Ripper and Monteague fall, and he has a clear shot as the ragged, depleted front rank closes over the bodies and comes their way._

_Sensat fires twenty-two times. Every shot bar two finds a target. Six of them kill, and he can see daylight. Fewer remain than he had thought, of this wave at least, and he almost starts to hope that he might survive._

_A sniper bullet catches him in the chest, drills through his shield and armour and sends him sprawling. His body goes numb, and his exhausted pistol drops from his hand. He lies there, and thinks._

_On reflection, he decides that it has been a life well worth living. He has done things and seen things he never thought he might. He would have liked to live, but - ah, snatches of an old song he's heard half a dozen times in the Spider bar come back to haunt him - you can't always get what you want._

_Sensat ends his life smiling. He knows he has done everything he can, and though he has failed, he considers it a good failure._

_His blood bubbles up into his throat and down his chin, and as everything begins to go dark, something nearby ignites in a huge explosion and takes him away on wings of fire._

* * *

Garrus wrenches the car down, applying the brakes as he does, and comes in screaming towards the opposite end of the bridge from the base. The bridge is wreathed in smoke, but he can see figures moving there, and he knows who they are.

The car touches down at a hundred kph and digs great grooves into the bridge as it screeches down half its length, crushing and flattening and pulverising at least half a dozen of the attackers, ending with one turian pinned against the bridge barrier with dust for a pelvis. The car's automatic safety fields save Garrus, and he struggles out of the car and into the smoke. His feet almost slip on a slimy, stinking brownish mix of half a dozen species' blood and guts.

_Please. Be alive..._

* * *

_This is the way Erash dies._

_He drags Sensat away from the table and into cover by the door, and draws his pistol. Melenis explodes ahead of him. He shouts out in grief and anger, and drops the pistol. It's of no use against such odds. Erash was not a good gambler, but even he would not have bet on any one of the team living longer than a couple of minutes._

_Well, it's been fun, he thinks. Can't say I didn't see this coming. But if they want me dead, it's gonna cost the fuckers._

_He has sixteen grenades on his belts. He starts with the crowd control specials. He watches five more of his friends fall before his eyes, and he screams their names with every grenade he throws. Red fire engulfs the bridge, two, three, four times, but still they come, even as their dead comrades rain down all around them. How the fuck do you like it, he howls, and throws half a belt at once. The explosion singes his face, and the front rank disappears yet again. A hundred, two hundred must have died already, but more and more advance over the mess of viscera carpeting the bridge._

_Erash howls his defiance at the inexorable attackers. This is not about justice, or freedom, or any of Garrus's lofty ideals. Those are gone. Now, it's about revenge, and bloodshed, and killing every last motherfucker he possibly can._

_Sensat falls at his side, shot through the chest. Erash's own shields are ragged, torn apart by the constant firepower coming his way, and at last they fail, leaving him exposed. The bullets come for him, and he falls back, writhing in pain. His stomach is perforated, his left arm hanging useless, his thigh spurting arterial blood._

_But he still has seven grenades._

_He focuses everything he has on staying conscious. One last effort. The pain is unbearable; he bites right through his lip and blood rushes down his throat. But he stays alive just long enough to see the first rank of troops loom over him._

_"Surprise, fuckers," he says weakly, and triggers the grenades. The fire takes the pain away._

* * *

Garrus fights better than he ever has in his life.

He turns and drops three snipers overlooking the bridge with three perfect headshots. As he sprints up the bridge, he slams into the back of a batarian and kills him with one nose-shattering palm thrust as he whirls around, and drops four troops with staccato shots to the back. A vast explosion belches out through the air as he approaches, the force sending him staggering back from the incredible heat, and suddenly he's alone on the bridge.

The dead are all around him. He sees Weaver lying dead, Mierin, Monteague, Ripper, and the bottom drops out of his soul.

_Oh, Spirits... I'm sorry, I'm so sorry..._

He walks into the base as if in a dream. Ruined corpses lie by the entrance, shattered into anonymity by short-range explosion, but Garrus recognises Erash and Sensat by their armour. And then he sees Butler.

* * *

_This is the way Butler dies._

_He is not a soldier. He is not a killer by nature. He has killed, and the memory of it has haunted his dreams for years._

_So when death comes for him, he is paralysed by fear. He ducks under the table when he hears the explosions and gunfire start up, and from there he crawls on hands and knees to behind a sofa in the living area. On his way there, he sees what they stand against, and death confronts him._

_And something changes in him._

_He sees his friends fall on the bridge, fighting for their lives. He sees Sensat shot. He sees Erash discard his pistol. And Butler decides that he will not go quietly into the night. It is no longer about survival. There will be none of that. But he will not go out without a fight._

_He snatches up Erash's pistol, fumbles with the safety, and starts firing. The noise assaults his ears and the recoil stabs at his shoulder, and for the second and last time in his life, Butler kills._

_Erash goes down bleeding, and Butler scrambles back, still firing at the shapes looming out of the smoke. The fear is still there, hot and raw and livid, but he forces it aside, refuses to shut down. He watches one, two of them fall and shouts defiantly as they see him. Bullets rake across him and he tumbles back, his body no longer obeying him._

_Something explodes ahead of him, and burning winds race over his skin, singeing his hair and burning away his eyebrows. He coughs, and the cough brings with it pain on an unimaginable level. Everything goes dark. But he is still conscious._

_Someone stands over him, saying something. He cannot see them or hear them properly. He's no longer sure where he is._

_"Nalah," he whispers, through cracked, bloodied lips. "Oh, god, Nalah, I can't see, I can't see..."_

_"It's OK," Nalah whispers back, and Butler smiles as the last of the light drains away._

* * *

Garrus lets Butler's head drop gently to the floor. The human's eyes are open and glassy, staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

"I'm sorry," Garrus says. The words are suddenly mechanical and hollow in his mouth. He can't feel anything.

"Garrus," Vortash gasps.

* * *

_This is the way Vortash dies._

_He reacts too slowly when the time comes. Melenis shouts, and Vortash is lost in confusion for a handful of precious seconds. The volus is already dead by the time he's scrambled to the door, and half a second later a sniper bullet lances straight through his shield, his armour, and his chest._

_He looks down at the rivulets of blue running down his armour, uncomprehending. Then his legs give out._

_He lies there on his side, barely able to move. Then, slowly, he starts to crawl, dragging himself away from the roar of the firefight. Blood pools and trails behind him in thick blue streaks, and his every breath brings an agonising metal grip down on his heart._

_Vortash hauls himself behind a couch and lies there, listening to the gunfire. He knows the wound is fatal. Maybe not immediately so, but fatal all the same._

_For a moment, he drifts in and out of consciousness. Then he hears a familiar voice, though only as if shouted across a distant valley._

_"Garrus," he croaks. Within a couple of seconds, Garrus is crouching before him, his face drawn and pale. He promises medical attention, that Vortash will live, but Vortash weakly waves a hand to silence him._

_"I'm a dead man," he says. Speech is pain. "Looks like - agh - I was too damn old for this shit... didn't even get any of the bastards. Sorry, Officer Vakarian. Not half the man I used to be." He tries to smile. "Soon I won't even be that."_

_"Just... just breathe, I'll get medigel," Garrus says frantically. "Come on, you can live through this!"_

_"No," Vortash says, and a sudden serenity descends on him. "I can't. Sorry. But... ahh, but you can live... run, while there's time... leave this hellhole before it takes you too. Go, Garrus, go..."_

_Blood chokes his words away. His vision has been growing more and more indistinct as he speaks, and he can barely see Vakarian now. He tries to breathe in again and finds that he can't._

_This is no place for an old man, he thinks, as consciousness slips away. I could use a little rest..._

* * *

Garrus watches as the peace of death settles on Vortash's worn old face.

A terrible, yawning emptiness opens up inside him. He searches for grief, but it is not there. He cannot find anger. He cannot find anything. There is simply darkness.

He stands, slowly, and looks out across the ruins of his life, and realises that this is the way Archangel dies.

* * *

_This is the way Sidonis dies._

_He sits on the shuttle out of Omega, watching it dwindle to nothing in the viewscreen. And he feels nothing._

_Jaroth had been true to his word. Sidonis had been packed off to the Citadel, thirty thousand credits in his accounts and an appointment with a disappearance specialist made. He had done the right thing._

_The journey is long. He tries to sleep, but cannot. Faces loom up at him, unspeaking. Reproach and regret are written on their faces._

_I did the right thing._

_He tries to eat, but the food has no taste. He tries to drink, but his throat will hardly let him. He sleeps at last with the aid of drugs, but when he awakes he is just as tired._

_It is weeks later, and he is unchanged._

_He spends his days alone in his apartment. He has everything he needs and nothing he wants. He wants peace. He wants to know what life is like beyond the veil of grey that seems to have descended over him. He wants freedom from the past._

_And he can never have it. Not for thirty thousand credits. Not for all the money in the galaxy._

_He spends his days in a walking stupor. Each is like the last. He chokes down tasteless food. Watches TV, but cannot take it in. Tries to read, but his mind wanders. He takes to drugging himself to sleep through most days. And even in those restless dreams, he sees the faces._

_The very worst thing about the way Sidonis dies is that he keeps on living afterwards._

* * *

This is the way it ends.

Garrus Vakarian stands in a room that stinks of fresh blood, a broken man. There is nothing left within him. He could flee, but to where? Why? What would the use be? What was there for him elsewhere that hadn't died in this room?

_Nothing._

Slowly, Garrus reaches down and calls up the base controls on his omnitool. He seals the lower doors. It will be his tomb.

He walks to the table and takes his helmet from where he'd left it just half an hour ago. Half an hour and an infinity, an infinity which he can never reach across.

He picks his way back through the bodies, through the wreckage of broken dreams and shattered ideals. The only sound is his footsteps.

Then, he hears them. The next wave.

He climbs the stairs, leaving bloody footprints behind him. When he reaches the balcony, he leans his rifle against a wall and turns his helmet over in his hands.

He stares at it for a long moment, and slips it over his head. Even inside the sealed environment, he cannot escape the smell of blood.

And they come. Whooping and hollering, guns in the air, the second assault comes his way. Every demon Omega could conjure, every monster and every devil, every killer, every murderer, every sinner and every one of Omega's condemned men converge on the angel's last citadel. They start to pour across the bridge.

Garrus watches them come. He knows it will not be easy. _But in the end, nothing ever is._

He picks up his rifle.


	55. Epitaph

_this has been_**  
****MASS EFFECT: INTERREGNUM**

* * *

**EPITAPH**

* * *

_And the mercy seat is burning_

_And I think my head is glowing_

_And in a way I'm hoping_

_To be done with all this weighing up of truth_

_An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth_

_And I've got nothing left to lose_

_And I'm not afraid to die._

* * *

'The Mercy Seat' – Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

* * *

**_ɑ_**


End file.
